Japan’s NEC has been a prominent vendor in successive mobile network generations in its home country, but has not translated its RAN engineering prowess internationally. For 5G, it aims to change that by riding on Open RAN, and particularly on many operators’ and governments’ desire to widen their choice of RAN suppliers. However, the bid to expand its RAN business will require considerable investment, and is inevitably hitting profits in this early stage. For the first nine months of its current fiscal year – which will end on March 31 2023 – NEC reported an operating loss of ¥600m ($4.6m) at its Networks unit, reversing an operating profit of ¥15.8bn ($120m) for the division at the same stage last year,…