Despite ongoing troubles in the telecom industry on account of competitive pressures, Swedish major Ericsson on Tuesady said high demand for data will force operators to keep investing in networks.

“We expect the mobile broadband traffic to grow multi-fold. The networks have to be geared up to cater to that traffic with as little opex as possible,” its Head of Network Products in the country, Nitin Bansal, told reporters here.

Asked if the company has witnessed any dent in pricing power while negotiating deals with telcos, he said the company sees continued investments, and operators continue to be interested in modernising and increasing capacities.

The three top incumbent telcos — Airtel, Vodafone and Idea — have faced huge impact on their financials in face of aggressive posturing by new entrant Reliance Jio.

Bansal acknowledged the company has benefited from the massive roll-out of fourth-generation networks by all the operators in the past two years, but declined to quantify the benefit.

India contributed 5 per cent of the Swedish firm’s global revenues with a top-line of SEK (Swedish krona) 10.748 billion in FY16.

Asked if the impending merger between Idea Cellular and Vodafone will have any impact on its operations, Bansal said it may benefit the company as the two telcos seek to consolidate their network to serve customers seamlessly.

Bansal said the company sees the number of smartphones going up to 810 million by 2021, which will be 58 per cent of the user base. It also sees a 15x jump in data traffic at 4.5 Exabytes by that year.

The networking and telecom equipment and services company on Tuesday launched two products in the country designed to provide enhanced customer experience while enabling telecom operators to boost capacity and be energy- and cost-efficient.