Rumors typically only become public as the deal is closing, and more people are brought in to do the work on it. The fact that there were rumors was a strong indication that the deal was about to take place.
Indication, but not guarantee. The point I was really trying to make, is that rumors typically don't leak at the very early stage, when there are limited people involved. The point at which rumors do start occurring, is at the very final, final stages - and so it's not surprising that a deal is closed soon after the rumors start leaking.
There were rumors already in December. And in September. And in May. Speculations about Nokia acquiring parts of Alcatel-Lucent or the whole of it have been recurrent since the sale of their cellphone business to MSFT in 2013.
Sounds like Nokia is looking for a way to prepare itself to enter the market with new products. Good news for Europeans for sure, since Nokia was the company that usually managed to translate products to European realities.
I don't think this has any positive implications for a potential new Nokia handset business. It is, however, possibly bad news for Ericsson and Huawei.
I don't really understand how this works. Microsoft bought Nokia for about $7B[1] and now Nokia pays more than twice that amount for Alcatel? Where is this money coming from and why is Alcatel worth so much more?
Microsoft only bought the handset business from Nokia, they didn't purchase all of Nokia. In fact, as I recall, they only got the right to use some of the brand names for a limited period of time.
Actually the Alcatel-Lucent they bought do not produce phones at all ;)
A while ago Alcatel got with TCL, a Chinese company, to take care of the handset business through a joint-venture initially. Then TCL bought and integrated the JV, and kept the rights to the Alcatel brand for handsets. The brand is likely to stay but it's now fully TCL (with still some ex-Alcatel employees).
Don't forget that Microsoft('s lackey) took care of lowering their value as much as possible before buying the Devices and Services unit for some spare change.
For those of you in the downvote mood please search about the hidden bonus given by NOKIA's board to Elop in his original contract for selling off phone division and then carefully evaluate the steps he did. His execution was almost perfect in the light of this "small part" of his contract.
Yeah. It wasn't Elop who created one of the most dysfunctional software development units ever. He was brought in when the damage of previous bad management was just becoming fully apparent.
Nokia in 2007-2010 was spending many times more than Apple on R&D. For that money, they got multiple infighting operating system teams each developing their own half-baked thing (Symbian, MeeGo, Qt, S40) and device teams that were building uncompetitive devices on top of 3-year-old software.
There was just no reason to write a memo like that. It destroyed their business, almost singlehandedly, and no, I'm not exaggerating. The consequences of that memo were insane: Nokia's handset sales died all over the world all at once.
We don't have more than quarter-level visibility. All we know is that Q1 2011 sales crashed and Elop wrote his memo. Which is the cause and which the consequence?
In Q4 2010, Nokia stuffed the channel with outdated products. In a market that was growing accustomed to iPhone and Android, Nokia tried to sell consumers products based on the first touch edition of Symbian S60 -- the same software that was considered outdated when it first shipped in Nokia 5800 years earlier. (Because of the way Nokia's product development pipeline worked, the mid-range phones they released in late 2010 contained software that was several years old.)
Isn't it possible that Nokia's Q1 2011 sales crashed simply because the channel was full of Symbian phones that just were not selling? As CEO, Elop would have visibility into that when he wrote his infamous memo.
A point against the "evil memo destroyed sales" theory is that purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime. When they stopped buying Nokia's phones in Q1 2011, the decision was already made earlier.
The fallout from that memo was instantaneous and widespread. I worked in wireless at the time and everyone I knew at all of the carriers began to pull Nokia inventory. This was not true in many markets.
Even if the burning platform concept was correct, releasing it in a companywide email instead of strategically shifting the company and then announcing the change in a measured, considered fashion would've been much better for their cash flows.
Purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime, usually, but I would argue that the CEO of a handset manufacturer declaring their entire existing lineup of products is going to be discontinued in viscerally graphic terms is one of the things that might spur such quick change.
> There was just no reason to write a memo like that
There was a very good reason to write it. Internally Nokia was delusional and confused, and desperately needed a wake-up call. Nothing less would have sufficed.
Nokia was delusional internally, but can you really make an argument that what they did was reasonable? Is there any world where it was better for them to choose Windows over Android?
That only happened because of Elop's previous Microsoft connections and it was clearly the wrong decision for the shareholders of the company.
"By every measure that the industry uses, Nokia Symbian smartphone sales grew from Q3 of 2010 to Q4 of 2010, literally the last full quarter before Elop released his Burning Platforms memo."
Q4 sales were higher than Q3 sales? I'm, uh... how about year-over-year comparisons? A seasonally-adjusted smoothed trendline? Anything OTHER than comparing sales figures in one quarter where there's Christmas and one quarter where there isn't?
Qt was bought in part to attempt to bridge Maemo/Meego and Symbian. Problem, in part, was that previous Maemo versions, as well as Intels Moblin project, used GTK. With Maemo5 you had a massive culture clash, that pretty much ripped the community down the middle.
Then the CEO was ousted, Elop brought in, and shit really hit the fan.
Then again, maybe Maemo should have just died at that point, rather than be resurrected as Mer/Sailfish. The whole thing produced ripples that seems set to yank the larger Linux community apart.
While Maemo was Debian in a mobile device, Mer/Sailfish at this point is as close to that as Android is.
While Maemo was Debian in a mobile device, Mer/Sailfish at
this point is as close to that as Android is.
Which is truly tragic. I'm not sure if many have experience using Maemo5 (especially the community build) but it represents the apex of phone operating systems in my opinion. Nothing is as pleasant to use, and to think that devices it was built for max out at 256MB of memory.
This is why the Neo900 is so interesting and needed because for the first time, we could get modern hardware in the n900's perfect case, with the community Maemo OS. I just wish it was easier to develop for that operating system >_<
I was working at a place trying to do smartphone type stuff with symbian way before it was cool and have been a MeeGo fan since the days when it was called Maemo so I'm about as a big a fanboy of both as they come.
But the truth is that Symbian had simply been stagnant for too long and would never catch up and MeeGo for all its potential was just another platform with even less backing than WP and even less ready to be sold. Had they decided to really go for it with on of Symbian or MeeGo a few years earlier and gotten on the smartphone bandwagon then I might have my MeeGo Lumia device I so wanted, but they didn't and by the time they realized their mistake it was too late. As much as I hate to admit it and as much as it didn't necessarily work out very well, going with WP was probably a good decision at the time
Yeah, it's true that the stagnation was a huge letdown, but when N8 and later 808 came out, I strongly believe the OS was (and still is to a degree) competitive. Incomparably more so than WP7 devices which first came out around the time of 808 as well.
Just out of curiosity, what do you mean "smartphone type stuff"? Symbian has been a smartphone OS since its inception.
You are maybe talking past each other a little. It wasn't case the case that the phones just lacked an app store. What really sucked about Nokia's symbian phones was the UI and the price tag. Now that's the fault of dysfunction within Nokia and not the fault of Symbian per se, but the fact remains if Nokia had just switched to Android it would likely still exist as a mobile phone company.
The argument against going Android was to avoid being another "me to" company. Back then the mantra of the Nokia leadership was "differentiation" (it was basically their response to why they could not open source the power management on the N800).
And if one look at the current Android market, they may be right. Samsung is only where it is right now because of a massive marketing push in the last few years.
Did not compare in speed/pretty animations, collection of "apps", and marketing. What else? Would you like me to list how doesn't the latest iOS compare to latest Symbian?
No, I'm not saying that. It's "slow" in comparison with whatever iPhone was out back then, but hardly slow in general. The same as Android is "slow" compared to latest iOS and WP. That argument is silly, sorry. Not to mention the speed was in part due to the low-performance hardware they used. I don't care about "pretty", I care about "functional". It had majority of necessary features built in. It wasn't tainted and nobody wanted it (the 808) because there was virtually no marketing for it and because it was simply unavailable on some major markets. Almost as if they didn't want it to sell.
So no, I don't think those are good reasons for abandoning any OS. Not for power-users anyway. iPhone is better in media consumption, that's it and that's what majority is after. And bandwagons, obviously.
Symbian may have been stagnant, but unless you are a Wall Street day trader you didn't much care. Symbian could demo capabilities that iOS and Android are just now sprouting (and the press is going gaga about it as if it is something completely new groan).
Nokia were doing awesome right until then! I fricking loved Symbian, so much better than Android/iOS. Oh. wait, no, it actually was complete garbage. But yes, Elop ruined their kick-ass smartphones. Gimme a break.
I think that the truth is that:
1. The Finns got too cocky for their own good.
2. The forget to monitor the other guys.
3. Apple predictably made a smartphone (years after the ipod) and made a silly amount of money, and was dominating the high-end segment after a really short while.
4. Google decided to own the mobile ads market, and basically just not care about the hardware, and was starting to dominate virtually every other segment.
5. Nokia had a few platforms, some apps, and only the dying feature phone market, and they realized this.
They would have had a chance (maybe) to go for Android, but judging by for instance Sony (that I think build the best phones. period. ) it is really hard to compete with high-end stuff against Apple.
Microsoft bought Nokia's handset division (roughly half the company) and the right to use the Nokia name for a limited time. They didn't buy the whole company.
Nokias handsets was a failing business, or at least seen as such, building networks is a growing business. There are still large parts of the world that does not yet have a mobile phone network, or where networks are still being upgrade.
The "new" Nokia is Nokia Networks (http://networks.nokia.com/), so it's the company that supplies the ISPs with their infrastructure.
Nokia Networks has been very separate venture from the better known Nokia-mobile. It was previously a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens known as NSN (Nokia Siemens Networks). In 2013 Nokia bought rest of the stock from Siemens and renamed it Nokia Networks.
I'm also former Nokia Networks: I would not say the "whole" thing was a big mistake. I could understand the business sense. Some parts of merger worked better and some were worse. Myself, I got a new boss from Siemens who was a good guy. Got laid off later on, though. Overall, the execution of that merger seems to have been better than the Alcatel-Lucent merger a year earlier. Nokia Networks is actually alive, which is much better than what I thought back in 2006. And not only alive, but actually doing rather well (at least until this).
The bad feeling I have about this is that in the picture, Suri shakes hands with Hollande. That tells how political the deal is, and how wrong it can go (with all that protectionism etc).
On the other hand JTB says this is not good, so I have the instinct reaction that it must be good.
I remember that culturally Siemens saw itself as a oil-tanker plowing through, and Nokia saw itself as a nimble and agile fish school. No wonder it ended up where it did, if the cultural differences in the way of working was so different.
Microsoft bought Nokia's consumer cell phones division.
Nokia is also a telecommunication equipment designer and manufacturer (since long before cell phones even existed) similar to Ericsson, Huawei or Alcatel-Lucent. They also got into nav/geomapping after buying Navteq (then Ovi, currently HERE) but that's probably getting spun off.
Essentially this means that Nokia won't get back into consumer hardware for a good while. The mapping division (Here) will probably be sold soon.
The mobile networks business is now the primary driver at the company. They'll have their hands full trying to integrate the Alcatel-Lucent networks business with their existing assets. (Remember that Nokia's networks business today is already the result of a merger with Siemens and a purchase of Motorola's networks division, so they have some experience with that.)
Nokia is now a formidable competitor to Ericsson and Huawei, but it won't be on Samsung's or Apple's radar again.
I know that Nokia does license the Nokia brand to Foxconn for Android tablets sold in the Chinese market... But that's not a sign of life in Nokia's consumer ambitions any more than it is for other brand licensors like Kodak or Polaroid.
Nokia's buying of AL probably means that they won't have to license the brand to Foxconn in order to make hardware. (The N1 is a pretty good tablet though.)
Also worth noting is that AL ows a pretty big pool of patents, so I'm not sure what was Nokia's main motivation.
ALU doesn't produce handsets anymore. Alcatel sold their handset business to TCL a while ago, and TCL has the rights to the brand for handsets. So even if the Alcatel name will disappear on the network side, it's likely to remain on handsets but it's just a brand for TCL.
I just hope whoever buys HERE doesn't screw it up. At the moment I do like them more than the google maps. They are also cheaper when it comes to licenses.
I've heard rumours Samsung is already using HERE heavily internally. So it would make sense- but what will happen to the other that are currently using it to (they've mentioned Microsoft, BMW etc. in the article).
Nokia Maps has almost always been better than Google Maps, it's just not well known. Nokia bought Navteq back in '07 I believe, and I used to use Nokia Maps on my N95, which had A-GPS for fast lock (new tech for GPS-enabled phones back then). People were floored that a phone could find POIs/food and do quality navigation. This was all pre-iPhone too.
Even now the current HERE Maps allows you to cache full countries for offline traveling and a bunch of other small features that add-up to leaving GM in the dust. Full offline caching has saved me in a number of situations. If Apple Maps wanted to compete with GM, they should buy HERE... and rename it to something better. It's been renamed about 4 times over the last 8 years.
> Nokia is now a formidable competitor to Ericsson and Huawei, but it won't be on Samsung's or Apple's radar again.
Ericsson maybe, but Huawei is a juggernaut that leaves them in the dust (massive growth both in terms of revenue and innovation, especially in emerging markets) .Alcatel-Lucent was really struggling throughout its existence.
They are better off not selling handsets anymore. Even Samsung and Apple will start to feel massive pressure on their margins sometime soon. Handset technology is leveling off and generic manufacturers are getting better at making them. It is much like what had happen to HDTVs recently. Sure there is "the ecosystem", but with Android the white box manufacturers get that for free too.
So yes Nokia squandered a huge lead in handset tech, but getting rid of the division has helped them a lot
I still have my Lumia Icon (Windows platform) and it still out specs most smartphones. It was a solid phone, and I only switched back to Android because of the lack app support from Android and iOS developers.
With more developers starting to port their apps to the Windows platform, I'm considering going back to it.
Just as a comparison:
Display Pixel Density
Lumia Icon: 441
Google Nexus 6 (new): 493
Camera
Lumia Icon: 20MB
Google Nexus 6 (new): 13MB
The marketing and launch for the product was very weird if this is the case. Why was it emphasized that it's a brand licensing deal? I think being so loud about it certainly diminished the value of the product. If Nokia designed the product, hardware and software, how is it different from the typical model (Apple etc.)? Is it because the 'producing' and money for the product came from the Chinese? I.e. the Chinese took the investment risk.
It was emphasized as such to shareholders because they are rightly concerned that having just essentially exited the market for consumer electronics, the company should not go re-entering the market exactly as before. And so you have this arrangement with a manufacturing partner which greatly reduces the risks Nokia assumes in re-entering the consumer market.
Hans Vesterberg, the current CEO of Ericsson noted that 10 years ago Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel, Lucent and Motorola was Ericsson largest competitors, all more or less the same size. Now the merged Nokia is as big as Ericsson. Almost.
10 years ago Huawei was busy stealing^^^inventing new technology, but now they are more or less the same size as Ericsson, but growing like hell.
So basically now Nokia, Erisson, Huawei or ZTE ( Are there any others ) actually build and run the Network Backend of Mobile Network, while Mobile / Cell Operators does the sales, marketing and customer services?
Just because you can't see the Nokia logo on the cell towers and base stations doesn't mean we don't make them. I'll take physical evidence and a balance sheet over dumb stuff like this.
I think you -- and others who haven't checked, which is understandable -- imagine that after Nokia sold their handset business to Microsoft, nothing was left but a tiny little husk. If that were true, your assumption would probably be correct, but it isn't. Nokia ended 2014 with over 60,000 employees worldwide and nearly €13B in revenue. They're still a really big company. Sure, they make some money from patent licensing -- as do all companies of that size -- but the vast majority of their revenue comes from network equipment and services.
For example, If you use T-Mobile in some markets, that's Nokia-Siemens, if you use AT&T, thats also NSN, plus ALU - Verizon, ALU, Sprint, Samsung, Ericsson or ALU depends on market.
They make very very real, very expensive products.
I was an under graduate engineer at Nortel Networks in the late nineties and early nougties writing code and building rigs to automate the testing of OC192 tx / rx components before they were assembled and usually dropped under the ocean.
I was amazed at the capabilities of this hardware and the next generation from both Nortel and its competitors,like Lucent.
It amazes me what is achievable but not viable for mass production. Or desirable by customers (good enough).
An industry that matters so much. With no backbone there is no network in so many places. Perhaps a few mergers will unlock the doors?
As tangents go this is an important one. Structural issues are strangling European growth and employment. Reform in France alone would make a big difference, and help pave the way for truly screwed up economies like Italy and Spain.
Nokia recently auctioned off literal tons of engineering equipment. Looks like they closed a huge engineering facility in Oulu, Finland. A lot of it looked like obsolete stuff (like for a big product line sustaining-engineering group). I don't know enough about cellular to say whether or how much of the stuff was really useful for new product development; but some of the equipment looked very recent. The only thing that I inferred at the time was that T&M resellers are going to have a better year than Rhode & Schwarz.
This is interesting, and probably good. These are two companies that make sense to consolidate, especially as both eye developing markets in SE Asia & Africa, and especially those markets that are open to Chinese development monies+influence (mostly in Africa).
On the integration side of things, yes, it will probably be a little challenging from a business systems & personnel point of view if they really want to become a single-faced corporation, but on the manufacturing & engineering side I think it'll be pretty easy. I don't know if my company is the largest EMS partner for either one, but I do know that both Nokia (otherwise referred to as NSN, Nokia-Siemens Networks) and ALU are both top-10 customers of ours, and collectively responsible for a couple billion in revenue. I mention this not because of anything to do with my company, but because both are already setup for effective automated integration with their EMS partners, so whatever they do on their side (e.g. changes to EDI rules/structure, ECO processes, NPI processes, etc) will be pretty easy to trickle down and deal with on our side.
My hope is that Nokia become the business leader part of this acquisition, not Alcatel-Lucent. They are very challenging to work with sometimes.
I wonder what this means for Alcatel-Lucent here in Ottawa. I briefly worked there in 2001 right after Alcatel bought out Newbridge. There is a strong networking division there designing some of those large backbone "routers".
HERE engineer here (yes, I also sometimes hate the noticeable amount of redundancy of our corporate brand). One important point that analysts haven't stressed enough while evaluating potential buyers, is the role our top customers play in all this dance.
By top customers I'm referring to car manufacturers in particular. They are the ones who are paying/will pay top dollar for our connected car offerings. A sale to a single car manufacturer would make the rest go away. A sale to Google, for example, would completely destroy our trust – these guys hate Google. A sale to Uber... Same thing.
Facebook, maybe? They've been known for respecting independence of acquired companies to a high degree. That could be one of our best shots IMO.
Is it perceived as a given that Nokia's going to dump HERE? I used to be with the Point & Find group, which is what became City Lens -- my impression is that they were working on a quasi-secret project all last year, some kind of outdoor adventure thing, but I noticed last month that just about everyone I'd worked with changed their LinkedIn status to things no longer associated with Nokia/HERE.
Alcatel is one of the main companies that sells FirefoxOS phones here in México. I wonder if it is the same in other countries. And I wonder if this will affect FirefoxOS in the long run? Will they switch to Windows?
For me this can be seen as a symptom of the problem with technology companies today: If you're too small you won't be able to survive. So everyone gets bought so that they don't die.
In the end you have a few big companies splitting up the market under themselves and the hurdles for a market entry are too high.
An even better example for this are semiconductor foundries.
Beginning of the end of Nokia Networks. Looks like they dont have any clue what to do. ALU enodeb is crap, Nokia ancient Flexi is crap and their new stuff will be crap if they will manage to sell this to somebody :-)
122 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia-acquis...
Nokia in 2007-2010 was spending many times more than Apple on R&D. For that money, they got multiple infighting operating system teams each developing their own half-baked thing (Symbian, MeeGo, Qt, S40) and device teams that were building uncompetitive devices on top of 3-year-old software.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the-fin...
There was just no reason to write a memo like that. It destroyed their business, almost singlehandedly, and no, I'm not exaggerating. The consequences of that memo were insane: Nokia's handset sales died all over the world all at once.
In Q4 2010, Nokia stuffed the channel with outdated products. In a market that was growing accustomed to iPhone and Android, Nokia tried to sell consumers products based on the first touch edition of Symbian S60 -- the same software that was considered outdated when it first shipped in Nokia 5800 years earlier. (Because of the way Nokia's product development pipeline worked, the mid-range phones they released in late 2010 contained software that was several years old.)
Isn't it possible that Nokia's Q1 2011 sales crashed simply because the channel was full of Symbian phones that just were not selling? As CEO, Elop would have visibility into that when he wrote his infamous memo.
A point against the "evil memo destroyed sales" theory is that purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime. When they stopped buying Nokia's phones in Q1 2011, the decision was already made earlier.
Even if the burning platform concept was correct, releasing it in a companywide email instead of strategically shifting the company and then announcing the change in a measured, considered fashion would've been much better for their cash flows.
Purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime, usually, but I would argue that the CEO of a handset manufacturer declaring their entire existing lineup of products is going to be discontinued in viscerally graphic terms is one of the things that might spur such quick change.
There was a very good reason to write it. Internally Nokia was delusional and confused, and desperately needed a wake-up call. Nothing less would have sufficed.
That only happened because of Elop's previous Microsoft connections and it was clearly the wrong decision for the shareholders of the company.
Q4 sales were higher than Q3 sales? I'm, uh... how about year-over-year comparisons? A seasonally-adjusted smoothed trendline? Anything OTHER than comparing sales figures in one quarter where there's Christmas and one quarter where there isn't?
Then the CEO was ousted, Elop brought in, and shit really hit the fan.
Then again, maybe Maemo should have just died at that point, rather than be resurrected as Mer/Sailfish. The whole thing produced ripples that seems set to yank the larger Linux community apart.
While Maemo was Debian in a mobile device, Mer/Sailfish at this point is as close to that as Android is.
This is why the Neo900 is so interesting and needed because for the first time, we could get modern hardware in the n900's perfect case, with the community Maemo OS. I just wish it was easier to develop for that operating system >_<
But the truth is that Symbian had simply been stagnant for too long and would never catch up and MeeGo for all its potential was just another platform with even less backing than WP and even less ready to be sold. Had they decided to really go for it with on of Symbian or MeeGo a few years earlier and gotten on the smartphone bandwagon then I might have my MeeGo Lumia device I so wanted, but they didn't and by the time they realized their mistake it was too late. As much as I hate to admit it and as much as it didn't necessarily work out very well, going with WP was probably a good decision at the time
Just out of curiosity, what do you mean "smartphone type stuff"? Symbian has been a smartphone OS since its inception.
At launch of iPhone Nokia had featurephones that were more capable.
And if one look at the current Android market, they may be right. Samsung is only where it is right now because of a massive marketing push in the last few years.
Did not compare in speed/pretty animations, collection of "apps", and marketing. What else? Would you like me to list how doesn't the latest iOS compare to latest Symbian?
So you're saying it was slow, kind of ugly, had no apps and the brand was so tainted that nobody wanted it.
Don't you think those are good reasons for abandoning Symbian?
So no, I don't think those are good reasons for abandoning any OS. Not for power-users anyway. iPhone is better in media consumption, that's it and that's what majority is after. And bandwagons, obviously.
The dialer was particularly awesome. It was the first time I saw a dialer that a) had untrained voice dialing and b) had vocal caller ID.
I had untrained voice dialing IN GREEK for years on my Nokia 701. And it actually worked correctly!
My brand new kitkat-soon-to-be-lolipop device cannot even voice dial English names.
I think that the truth is that: 1. The Finns got too cocky for their own good. 2. The forget to monitor the other guys. 3. Apple predictably made a smartphone (years after the ipod) and made a silly amount of money, and was dominating the high-end segment after a really short while. 4. Google decided to own the mobile ads market, and basically just not care about the hardware, and was starting to dominate virtually every other segment. 5. Nokia had a few platforms, some apps, and only the dying feature phone market, and they realized this.
They would have had a chance (maybe) to go for Android, but judging by for instance Sony (that I think build the best phones. period. ) it is really hard to compete with high-end stuff against Apple.
The "new" Nokia is Nokia Networks (http://networks.nokia.com/), so it's the company that supplies the ISPs with their infrastructure.
The bad feeling I have about this is that in the picture, Suri shakes hands with Hollande. That tells how political the deal is, and how wrong it can go (with all that protectionism etc).
On the other hand JTB says this is not good, so I have the instinct reaction that it must be good.
Nokia is also a telecommunication equipment designer and manufacturer (since long before cell phones even existed) similar to Ericsson, Huawei or Alcatel-Lucent. They also got into nav/geomapping after buying Navteq (then Ovi, currently HERE) but that's probably getting spun off.
The mobile networks business is now the primary driver at the company. They'll have their hands full trying to integrate the Alcatel-Lucent networks business with their existing assets. (Remember that Nokia's networks business today is already the result of a merger with Siemens and a purchase of Motorola's networks division, so they have some experience with that.)
Nokia is now a formidable competitor to Ericsson and Huawei, but it won't be on Samsung's or Apple's radar again.
I know that Nokia does license the Nokia brand to Foxconn for Android tablets sold in the Chinese market... But that's not a sign of life in Nokia's consumer ambitions any more than it is for other brand licensors like Kodak or Polaroid.
Also worth noting is that AL ows a pretty big pool of patents, so I'm not sure what was Nokia's main motivation.
Samsung has been slowly building up their own "shadow stack" for mobile. They have everything from the OS up, but map data is a huge missing piece.
Also, I think Samsung's homegrown Tizen OS has some ambitions on the automobile side, and that's a market where Here has been doing well.
Even now the current HERE Maps allows you to cache full countries for offline traveling and a bunch of other small features that add-up to leaving GM in the dust. Full offline caching has saved me in a number of situations. If Apple Maps wanted to compete with GM, they should buy HERE... and rename it to something better. It's been renamed about 4 times over the last 8 years.
Ericsson maybe, but Huawei is a juggernaut that leaves them in the dust (massive growth both in terms of revenue and innovation, especially in emerging markets) .Alcatel-Lucent was really struggling throughout its existence.
So yes Nokia squandered a huge lead in handset tech, but getting rid of the division has helped them a lot
Hell, Samsung basically had to go on a marketing blitz to get where they are right now.
I should know, I was PM on it.
With more developers starting to port their apps to the Windows platform, I'm considering going back to it.
Just as a comparison:
Display Pixel Density Lumia Icon: 441 Google Nexus 6 (new): 493
Camera Lumia Icon: 20MB Google Nexus 6 (new): 13MB
Processor: Lumia Icon: Quad core, 2200 MHz, Krait 400 Google Nexus 6 (new): Quad core, 2700 MHz, Krait 450
System Memory: Lumia Icon: 2048 MB RAM Google Nexus 6 (new): 3072 MB RAM
Keep in mind the Lumia was released in February 2014, The Nexus 6 was in November of 2015
It's a company that has no speed to compete in the modern world
See what divisions they closed/sold off in the past years
Can't say I'm sorry
10 years ago Huawei was busy stealing^^^inventing new technology, but now they are more or less the same size as Ericsson, but growing like hell.
Cisco and others are getting into the small cell space.
Not that many people realize that Samsung are in to building base stations.
Cisco have always been in the back haul, core mobile routing space, along with Juniper, and some others smaller players.
Produce little to nothing and just sue for royalties on other manufacturers.
They make very very real, very expensive products.
edit: question mark
I was amazed at the capabilities of this hardware and the next generation from both Nortel and its competitors,like Lucent.
It amazes me what is achievable but not viable for mass production. Or desirable by customers (good enough).
An industry that matters so much. With no backbone there is no network in so many places. Perhaps a few mergers will unlock the doors?
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38b9dbf6-e2bd-11e4-bf4b-00144...
As tangents go this is an important one. Structural issues are strangling European growth and employment. Reform in France alone would make a big difference, and help pave the way for truly screwed up economies like Italy and Spain.
http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of-com...
On the integration side of things, yes, it will probably be a little challenging from a business systems & personnel point of view if they really want to become a single-faced corporation, but on the manufacturing & engineering side I think it'll be pretty easy. I don't know if my company is the largest EMS partner for either one, but I do know that both Nokia (otherwise referred to as NSN, Nokia-Siemens Networks) and ALU are both top-10 customers of ours, and collectively responsible for a couple billion in revenue. I mention this not because of anything to do with my company, but because both are already setup for effective automated integration with their EMS partners, so whatever they do on their side (e.g. changes to EDI rules/structure, ECO processes, NPI processes, etc) will be pretty easy to trickle down and deal with on our side.
My hope is that Nokia become the business leader part of this acquisition, not Alcatel-Lucent. They are very challenging to work with sometimes.
By top customers I'm referring to car manufacturers in particular. They are the ones who are paying/will pay top dollar for our connected car offerings. A sale to a single car manufacturer would make the rest go away. A sale to Google, for example, would completely destroy our trust – these guys hate Google. A sale to Uber... Same thing.
Facebook, maybe? They've been known for respecting independence of acquired companies to a high degree. That could be one of our best shots IMO.
In the end you have a few big companies splitting up the market under themselves and the hurdles for a market entry are too high.
An even better example for this are semiconductor foundries.