• Sweden among top ICT countries
• Ericsson cuts 450 Swedish sales and admin jobs

Swedish mobile network giant Ericsson has filed three lawsuits in Europe against Chinese rival ZTE for patent infringement, a spokesman said Saturday.

"For the UK and Italy it's patents on mobile phones. In Germany, it's both phones and infrastructure," Fredrik Hallstan told AFP, adding that the firm had tried "for several years" to get them to sign licence agreements.

"We've signed licence agreements with 90 companies and in order to get the market to work in a fair way, we think it's right that everyone who uses patents signs and pays for licence agreements," Hallstan added.

ZTE and another Chinese firm, Huawei, have in recent years zoomed to being one of the world's top mobile phone manufacturers, eating into the market share of leading Western companies.

Ericsson, headquartered in Stockholm, has some 17,848 employees in Sweden and 90,000 worldwide.

It is the market leader in mobile network equipment ahead of Finnish-German giant Nokia Siemens, French-based telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent and China's Huawei.