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China is curbing the use of European telecom kit suppliers Nokia and Ericsson in its networks as President Xi Jinping pushes to decouple the country’s critical tech infrastructure from the west.
Two people familiar with the matter said Chinese state-backed buyers of IT equipment — which include mobile network operators, utilities and other industries — have begun more closely analysing and policing foreign bids.
That process has required contracts by Sweden’s Ericsson and Finland’s Nokia to be submitted for “black box” national security reviews by the Cyberspace Administration of China where the companies are not told how their gear is assessed.
The reviews by the powerful tech watchdog can stretch three months or longer. Even in cases where the European groups ultimately secure approval, the lengthy and uncertain audits often leave them at a disadvantage to Chinese rivals that face no such scrutiny, the people said.
“If China is doing this for national security reasons, the question is why Europe does not reciprocate by applying the same standard,” said one of the people, who asked not to be named.
Beijing’s effort to curtail European vendors follows a similar drive in Europe, where some governments have warned against working with Chinese telecoms giants Huawei and ZTE. But those calls have had an only limited impact on the Chinese companies’ market share on the continent.
China’s national security reviews come as Xi pushes a self-strengthening drive aiming to replace broad swaths of foreign technology. Last month, with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un at his side, Xi declared China “does not fear power or coercion” as it “stands strongly on its own with self-reliance.”
Beijing’s efforts to phase out European equipment deepened after a 2022 update to the cyber security law, which required operators of “critical information infrastructure” to submit any purchase with potential security risks for review by CAC.
State buyers of telecom equipment now require bidders to include detailed documentation on every component in their systems and the portion of local content, said the people familiar with the process, noting foreign groups were even including the details of Chinese R&D efforts to try to bolster their applications.
Customers send the detailed packets to CAC for approval, which reviews the package and directly notifies the state-owned buyers whether they can proceed with the purchases.
Beijing’s growing sales restrictions have collapsed Ericsson’s and Nokia’s combined market share in China’s mobile telecoms networks to about 4 per cent last year from 12 per cent in 2020, according to analyst Stefan Pongratz at research provider Dell’Oro Group.
Both companies have reported declining China revenues, with Nokia’s in-country revenues falling by double digit percentages from 2023.
“It’s so slow that even the breadcrumbs of market share [the European companies] get from major tenders are often shifted to Chinese vendors,” said one of the people.
The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China recently said the localisation requirements in IT and telecom posed an “existential threat” to the continent’s tech groups. Nearly three quarters of respondents to the chamber’s recent member survey said the restrictions had lost them business.
European policymakers have also voiced security concerns about Chinese telecom vendors, warning of espionage risks and potential backdoor access. But most capitals have been slow to impose bans, deterred by the low cost of Chinese equipment and the desire to avoid provoking Beijing.
Around five years after the European Commission urged member states to bar high-risk suppliers such as Huawei and ZTE, only 10 of the EU’s 27 countries had introduced restrictions as of June 2025, according to regulatory research firm Cullen International.
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Huawei and ZTE have retained 30 to 35 per cent of the European mobile infrastructure market, down only 5 to 10 percentage points from 2020, data from Dell’Oro Group shows.
Germany has 59 per cent of installed 5G gear sourced from Chinese groups, according to John Strand of Strand Consult, even though the country plans to phase out high risk Chinese vendors by 2029.
“All the mobile network equipment in Berlin is Chinese,” said Strand. “Germany has big industries like chemicals and cars that don’t want relations with China to be hurt.”
Ericsson and Nokia declined to comment. CAC did not respond to a request for comment.
