Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm took the blame for the company writing off nearly $4 billion of its $6.2bn investment in Vonage Holdings.

First reported in SDxCentral, Ekholm admitted in Ericsson’s most recent earning call that he was responsible for the purchase of Vonage and its deteriorating performance.

Ekholm said: “I’m accountable as CEO, no choice about that, so you can have that there.

“But hold your horses a bit before you assess the overall transaction until we know if we can create a separate new market for network APIs. I think that’s where our focus was the whole time. Maybe we have not delivered on the current performance of the existing business. We need to improve that.”

Vonage's devaluation has been attributed to a revaluation of rival stocks and the company’s own weak sales.

Ericsson acquired cloud communication provider Vonage in 2022.

Since then, the company has recorded two noncash impairment charges on its acquisition of Vonage; one of $2.9 billion in 2023 and another of $1.09 billion earlier this month.

Ericsson, led by Ekholm, has already sold off many of the assets acquired by former CEO Hans Vestberg. Ekholm also ruled out any bidding for optical vendors, even after Nokia’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Infinera in June.

Vonage was founded in 1998, initially as Min-X, a company that focused on providing residential telecommunications services based on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The company changed its name to Vonage in 2001.