Ericsson (full name Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson) is a multinational company of Swedish origin dedicated to offering telecommunications equipment and solutions, mainly in the fields of telephony, mobile telephony, multimedia communications and the Internet.
The company was founded in 1876 by Lars Magnus Ericsson originally as a telegraphy equipment repair shop. M. Ericsson began his journey as a worker in various factories, partly in his native Värmland, part in Stockholm. After a stay abroad as a scholarship student, he created a workshop in 1876 to manufacture mathematical and physical instruments.
This was the same year that Bell patented the telephone. Ericsson began to manufacture telephone sets within a few years, releasing the first telephone sets built by him in 1878. Soon his inventiveness became known on world markets. From his workshops, Lars Magnus Ericsson created the joint-stock company A.-BLM Ericsson & Co. He created a system of shares divided into type A shares and type B shares, with the vote of one type A share equivalent to 1000 times the vote of a type B share. This allowed him to have share control of the company.
The company also expanded internationally, with Russia and Poland among the first countries to which Ericsson expanded. In the 1930s the company moved to Stockholm, the then underdeveloped Midsomamarkransen sector. The factory soon became the hallmark of the sector's landscape, and when the metro was expanded in the 1960s, the station was renamed Telefonplan.
Development of the AX system began in the 1970s, one of the pioneering systems in digital telephony and still one of the market leaders. In the 1990s Ericsson became the leading manufacturer of cell phones. Although it still maintains a leadership in telephone switching equipment, mainly in GSM technology; the manufacture of mobile terminals (telephones) was left to a new company: Sony Ericsson, created in association with Sony.