North America is increasingly important to Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) now that the Swedish telecom infrastructure company has completed its acquisition of Nortel Networks and won the contract to manage Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel’s network. Following those two big deals, North America is Ericsson’s largest sales region and its second-largest employment center, reports RCR Wireless.

Through Ericsson’s $1.13 billion purchase of Nortel, which was finalized Nov. 13., the company gained 2,500 employees. Through the outsourcing deal with Sprint, Ericsson hired 6,000 employees. In all, it now has 16,000 employees here, including 2,000 contract workers, said Angel Ruiz, head of Ericsson’s North American operations. Ericsson will likely grow more, too, having won deals with Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) and MetroPCS to build out their LTE networks as part of their Nortel acquisition. Of course, the market is still very competitive with other companies still in the space, including Alcatel Lucent, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Siemens and China’s Huawei Technologies.