Samsung has been pegged to take over from Ericsson as Asia-Pacific's biggest LTE base station vendor for 2011.
Research firm NPD In-Stat estimates that Samsung will have deployed over 10,000 LTE base stations across APAC in 2011.
But while Ericsson has been winning deals spread out across the region, Samsung's LTE deployments have been concentrated in its home market of South Korea.
Seven vendors – Samsung, Ericsson, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, NSN and ZTE – currently capture over 94% of the market.
The largest player in the APAC LTE market has been changing annually. In 2009 it was Japan's NEC, due to that nation's regional lead in deploying LTE gear.
NPD In-Stat attributed Ericsson's win in 2010 to its broad support from operators across the region.
Projections indicate that Huawei could take the top spot by 2015, according to the researchers, but Huawei, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and ZTE will each have nearly 10% of the region's LTE base station shipments.
The market for LTE evolved packet core, router and gateway equipment is less close-run, with Alcatel-Lucent dominating with one third of deployments in 2010.
But while the researchers expect Alcatel-Lucent to maintain the top spot through to 2015, its dominance will weaken significantly.