“We compete quite favourably with Huawei, with or without the current security concerns,” Suri said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Caroline Hyde on Monday, referring to issues raised by the US and elsewhere about China’s Huawei Technologies Co, the world’s largest manufacturer.

Against fellow Nordic competitor Ericsson AB, “we win two-thirds of the time,” Suri said, “compared to one-third of the time that they swap us out.”

The CEO is rebutting concerns from some analysts and executives that Nokia has fallen behind in the early phases of delivering products for the fifth generation of mobile networks.

A few weeks of delays “is not really much” in the context of a 15-20 year cycle, Suri said.

In the first quarter, the Finnish company struggled to book revenue from the contracts it had signed  – 42 globally thus far  – but now expects to start recognising revenue “soon.”

Customers are choosing Nokia because it can supply a full system of hardware – or what it calls end-to-end networks  – complete with software and services, Suri said.

About 35% of its pipeline consisted of end-to-end orders a year ago, and that’s now up to about 49%, he said, while about half of Nokia’s 5G contracts announced to date go beyond just 5G radio.

Industrial clients want to “buy the system” and don’t care where various components come from, Suri said.

Nokia already has about 1,000 such enterprise customers and adds another 150 to 200 a year, he said.

Business from companies using private networks for the internet-of-things “will be fairly significant,” Suri said. “We see the big opportunities in manufacturing, logistics, supply chains, utilities, mining, all kinds of energy companies, water, wind farms, transportation, you name it.”