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Nokia & Siemens To Merge Network Business
An anonymous reader writes "Nokia and Siemens are joining forces in fixed and mobile network businesses to create a new global player, Nokia Siemens Networks. Based in Finland, the new company will have a revenue of 15.8 billion euros, and a workforce of 60.000 (before the projected "synergy benefits", that will cut costs 1,5 billions euros, and make 10-15 per cent of employees redundant, that is). More info in their press release." There's been other information released in the media as well.
This is only the networking divisions, not the phone divisions. It won't affect the phone development at all. (At least not in the current network generations)
The merged company isn't doing phones, they're doing telecom network equipment.
There are already too many misleading comments talking about mobile phones and other products made by Nokia and Siemens. Maybe it is time to remind some uninformed readers that:
This merger affects the part of each company that is dealing with mobile network infrastructure: things like the mobile switching centers, GPRS support nodes, many nodes in the radio access networks and so on... This has very little to do with the terminals (mobile phones). These companies will keep on selling and developing their mobile phones independently (or via BenQ, for Siemens)
For comparison, when Sony and Ericsson merged their mobile phone divisions, the network part of Ericsson remained independant. Same for all other parts of Sony. Nobody expected to see a Walkman(tm) or a Bravia(tm) screen added to Ericsson's network switches and nobody expected to see the Sony Vaio laptops turning into GSM base stations.