We attended the Mavenir analyst meeting last week. The company has made progress in developing its radio products, while at the same time it has grown revenues approximately 15% this year and bookings are estimated to reach $510M this year. The company expects to achieve a 28% EBITDA margin this year, greater than last year’s profitability rate. The company has 3,100 full time employees, up significantly from last year. We met executives hired recently with impressive pedigrees. The company is positioning itself as a US based end-to-end mobile network operator supplier.
In 2019, most of the company’s revenues are from the telecom core products. Generally, the company is taking a software-only approach to the mobile network market, which in many ways is what operators want from its suppliers. By taking a software-only approach, the company leaves some of its destiny in the hands of others, especially when it comes to hardware acceleration and radio units.
The company has achieved success in VoLTE and RCS. It is using the growing brand it has developed in these telecom core services areas to get access to RAN projects. The company describes its RAN activities and its partner’s radio capabilities as being able to handle radio connection densities on the order of 200 users per radio.
Mavenir plans to bring User Plane Forwarding capabilities for packet core to market next year with hardware acceleration; chip suppliers that were mentioned include Intel and Mellanox (now Nvidia). The company is investigating various acceleration techniques such as GPU, ARM and FPGA, which presumably will allow the company to provide a denser baseband system than is currently possible.
The company is targeting mobile operators that are making initial deployments of O-RAN based radio systems. Mavenir explained that European RFIs are allocating a certain number of RAN sites to O-RAN. The company claims to have recently been awarded some O-RAN contracts that have limited deployment scenarios. Vodafone CEO made public statements in support of working with Mavenir recently.