Wireless

Nokia campus sale nears as Hotard bets on industrial AI

By Dan Jones, Stephen Saunders MBE Oct 7, 2026 9:05pm

Nokia campus sale nears as Hotard bets on industrial AI — Nokia may soon name a buyer for its campus private networks unit as rivals gain share, but CEO Justin Hotard is betting on bigger money in industrial infrastructure.

Nokia could announce a buyer for its campus private networks business as early as Oct. 22
Ericsson and private 5G specialists are taking market share from Nokia
CEO Justin Hotard is betting on higher-value industrial infrastructure rather than campus network volume

An analyst told FNTV Wednesday that Nokia may be close to selling its Enterprise Campus Edge (ECE) private networks business.

“Nokia has more or less signaled that a deal is close,” said Roy Chua (bless you), principal analyst at AvidThink. “In Q2 it moved the campus business into discontinued operations and called a sale highly probable, and it has said it expects a resolution by the end of 2026.”

Chua will be watching Nokia's Oct. 22 third-quarter results for news of a sale.

“It's not going to be a sizable deal since only about €17 million of net assets were held for sale across the campus and fixed wireless units,” Chua said, citing Nokia's June 30, 2026, financials. That's approximately $19 million or around 70 billion Mongolian tögrög, for those following the transaction from Ulaanbaatar.

“Logical buyers are an industrial automation player, a systems integrator or private equity running it as a standalone.”

A private equity acquisition would probably be the least welcome outcome for the unit's employees. Obviously. Chua considers an acquisition by a rival cellular radio vendor far less likely.

FNTV asked Nokia Wednesday whether it had found a buyer. We'll update this story when the company responds.

Market share questions

Nokia CEO Justin Hotard announced plans to sell ECE last November, describing it as “a good business” but not aligned with Nokia's “core technology.”

This produced much wailing and gnashing of teeth among analysts at Nokia's Capital Markets Day in Manhattan, where Hotard broke the news. There were dire predictions, finger-wagging and warnings that Nokia would surrender its private wireless leadership.

They may have been right about the market share, at least.

“We expect Ericsson to overtake Nokia [by the end of the year],” said Asad Khan, 5G research director at SNS Telecom & IT. “Our current estimate is that Nokia has lost approximately 15% of its market share to Ericsson and private 5G specialists and startups.”

Chua sees evidence of the shift. “What we are seeing are some early indicators,” he said. “Specialists like Celona are winning multisite campus deals that Nokia would probably have been favored for.”

As Fierce Network has previously reported, Ericsson is positioning itself to replace Nokia as the leading Western private networks vendor. But counting contracts Nokia no longer wants may not tell us much about whether Hotard's strategy is working.

Nokia's cunning plan

Hotard explained his reasoning to me [Steve] during a conversation at DTW Ignite in Copenhagen in July. The campus business was relatively low-margin and, worse, put Nokia in direct competition with its own carrier customers, many of whom were trying to sell private 5G services to the same enterprises.

Why invest in a business that generates modest margins while irritating the companies buying your core network equipment?

Hotard wasn't abandoning private 5G. He was changing what Nokia wanted to sell, whom it wanted to sell it to and where it intended to make its money.

At the heart of the strategy is a truth that still seems to escape many wireless pundits: not all private 5G, or Wi-Fi for that matter, is created equal. There's a considerable difference between supplying a network to connect tablets in a warehouse or badge scanners at a trade show and engineering the communications infrastructure for an autonomous mine, a national railway or an electricity grid.

The second requires considerably more than a box o' radios and a screwdriver.

Nokia can combine private 5G and LTE with industrial-grade IP and optical transport, fiber access, network automation, edge computing and secure communications. In railways and utilities, these technologies support the resilient backbones, timing, synchronization and management systems required for critical operations. In factories, ports and mines, they connect industrial controllers, autonomous vehicles, robots and machine-vision systems to local computing resources.

A dropped connection to a warehouse tablet means someone's kitty litter may arrive a day late. A communications failure involving autonomous mining equipment, railway signaling or an electricity distribution system can stop production, damage equipment or endanger lives. The customers buying those systems have rather more to worry about than the monthly wireless bill.

Nokia has decades of experience integrating mission-critical communications infrastructure, as well as relationships with industrial automation companies including Siemens, Rockwell Automation and Bosch Rexroth. It doesn't manufacture the robots or control every industrial application, but neither do Ericsson, Celona or the other private 5G vendors. All depend on partners to integrate communications infrastructure with machinery, operational technology and industrial software.

Nokia's advantage, if it can exploit it, is the breadth of infrastructure it can supply beyond wireless connectivity. Hotard wants to compete on engineering capability and the value of the systems Nokia enables, rather than the price of a campus network.

The real market isn't just private 5G

The global private 5G market is worth an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion today, depending on the research firm. Industry 4.0 is a much bigger proposition. The Business Research Company forecasts a $460 billion global market by 2030, while BCC Research, using a broader definition that includes industrial IoT, robotics, cloud computing and digital twins, puts the figure at $1.6 trillion.

Those figures describe different markets, and Nokia cannot address anything approaching the entire Industry 4.0 opportunity. But Hotard is positioning the company for an industrial economy in which machines, rather than employees, increasingly determine the demand for communications and computing infrastructure.

A network connecting employees is generally justified by improvements in human productivity. A network supporting autonomous machinery can influence the output of an entire factory, mine or port. Its value is measured in uptime, production throughput, energy consumption and the cost of a stopped production line.

Those systems also need predictable communications, local intelligence and the ability to keep operating when external connectivity fails. An autonomous production line cannot wait for a hyperscale data center hundreds of miles away to decide whether a robot should stop moving.

Nokia has spent decades engineering networks where reliability is not optional. Hotard is betting that this expertise, combined with the company's optical, IP, wireless and edge technologies, will be worth considerably more in an automated industrial economy than another few thousand campus access points.

Ericsson and the private 5G specialists may inherit some of Nokia's campus business. Whether that translates into a comparable advantage in industrial infrastructure remains to be seen.

The risk in Hotard's strategy

Chua has a legitimate concern about what Nokia is giving up.

“I guess the question is whether Nokia makes more profit from private networks with this pivot — that's probably a yes,” he said. “What they are possibly giving up is the long-term growth option in campus and Industry 4.0.”

Today's modest campus deployment could become tomorrow's automated factory. The supplier installing the first private network may have an advantage when the customer starts connecting autonomous vehicles, industrial controllers and machine-vision systems.

But Nokia isn't surrendering the entire industrial market by selling ECE. It is choosing not to compete for certain campus deployments while continuing to pursue larger, mission-critical infrastructure contracts. And reliance on industrial automation partners and systems integrators is a feature of the whole market, not a particular weakness in Nokia's approach.

The commercial test is whether the contracts Nokia retains and wins generate enough additional profit to outweigh the business it is giving up. Higher contract values alone won't establish that Hotard was right; margins, integration costs and Nokia's ability to retain a valuable role in industrial infrastructure will matter just as much.

The analysts are right to measure Nokia's declining share of private wireless. But they also need to measure the value and profitability of the industrial infrastructure business it is building.

A Turkish trade show hall versus the industrial economy

Not everyone is convinced. Khan pointed to the Istanbul Expo Center, which he said had publicly declared that it made the right decision not to select Nokia for its standalone private 5G deployment.

Fair enough. Losing customers is rarely a cause for celebration, and Nokia still has to prove that its new business is more profitable than the one it is surrendering.

But given the scale of the industrial transformation now under way, Hotard may consider the loss of a wireless contract in a Turkish exhibition hall an acceptable price to pay.

The analysts can count the access points. Nokia is betting on the machines.