I'm a former Ericsson field engineer, These layoffs seem to have more to do with the normal telecom deployment lifecycle (aka LTE and 5G deployment periods winding down) than anything else.
Telecom equipment sales is often very cyclic.
To note further, Ericsson, Nokia et al, shouldn't be thought of as IT companies in the same vein as Google, Apple and Facebook. They exist in a very different parallel universe.
Indeed, telecoms is not the same thing, specially in what concerns standards, patents, kind of software that gets developed versus hardware and so forth, former Nokia Networks over here.
Telecom equipment sales is often very cyclic.
To note further, Ericsson, Nokia et al, shouldn't be thought of as IT companies in the same vein as Google, Apple and Facebook. They exist in a very different parallel universe.