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Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic
jones_supa (887896) writes "Nokia's future as a company focused on providing network solutions, rather than mobile phones, looks to be bright. The company made big profits in the second quarter of 2014 after selling its mobile devices unit — the cornerstone of Nokia's rise in the 1990s — to Microsoft. Meanwhile Nokia has been buying up other businesses such as the Chicago-based SAC Wireless. Now Nokia is acquiring part of Panasonic's network business in an effort to boost its presence in Japan. The deal announced Thursday will give the Finnish firm control of roughly one third of Japan's mobile network market."
How good is the cellphone reception in a Minuteman silo?
Panasonic plays in all kinds of networks, including Smart Grid. Smart grid networks are projected to grow tremendously in the next decade. Perhaps this is a move to get a piece of it.
Many smart meters are already cellular, and I know there are all kinds of network types for smart grid, including cellular, drive-by wireless, mesh networks, zigbee, wifi, and PLC.
Owning a piece of Panasonic gives Nokia turnkey exposure to all of these markets.
I thought that Nokia was a Japanese company. Maybe with the Japanese electronics boom of the eighties they were happy to let that misconception persist.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I thought that Nokia was a Japanese company.
No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that. They are a Finnish company and that fact is well known worldwide. I can see how one might think they were Asian though since so much electronics comes from that part of the world. But Nokia got quite a lot of press regarding where they were from.
Granted, Nokia sold their phone/mobile device business to Microsoft and before that, I thought they sold their network appliance business to Checkpoint which is a BSD based kernel if I remember correctly. Old, but still fairly solid.
I honestly didn't know Nokia had anything left, so color me surprised with this.
Place something witty here
Letting Samsong, and Apple sue each other; mean while m$ makes inroads for future litigations to a weakened industry?
It is a platform going nowhere, despite a huge marketing spend.
I know people working for two major developers, who have just killed windows phone versions of their software, apparently due to dismal sales.
Microsoft will have to change course, if Nokia is to remain in the hardware business, and sell phones with software that people want to buy.
they can go back to being a lumber mill!
One must remember in 2008 the tech press was reporting that it was Qualcomm that was on the ropes due to its IP steadily decreasing in value. But Qualcomm, whose CEO was a Ph.D. in EECS from Cal Berkeley, invested in developing their own ARM SoC as well as LTE baseband chips and bought AMD mobile graphics division for a complete smartphone solution. Meanwhile Nokia invested in neither a modern ARM SoC, unlike Apple and Qualcomm and Samsung, nor in LTE baseband chipsets, nor in foundry relationships unlike again Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
Nokia the phone company was a dead man walking in 2008 long before Elop got there.
Just so long as they don't stop them from making 50" plasma TV's before it's time to upgrade my current set!
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Nokia is 7 years too late trying to be the company Ericsson remade itself into in the 2000. The key blunder was Nokia's backing WiMAX, a technology that was horribly marketed as potentially cutting out the major telecoms, whereas Ericsson helped create LTE with Verizon [ericssonhistory.com] by providing a solution for Verizon to upgrade from CDMA.
It's surprising to me that the tech sites have not trumpeted perhaps history's greatest example of a company paying the price for failing to invest in the next generation of technology. Instead of building on its baseband expertise, Nokia tried to outsource it ignoring LTE. This destroyed its relationship with its fab partner TI who then pulled out of the mobile phone market leaving Nokia with no supplier for its then line of phones. Nokia was then left having to turn to Qualcomm ... only it had been involved in a massive legal battle with Qualcomm over IP which Nokia then had to settle for an immediate payment of the equivalent of billions of dollars.
One must remember in 2008 the tech press was reporting that it was Qualcomm that was on the ropes due to its IP steadily decreasing in value. But Qualcomm, whose CEO was a Ph.D. in EECS from Cal Berkeley, invested in developing their own ARM SoC as well as LTE baseband chips and bought AMD mobile graphics division for a complete smartphone solution. Meanwhile Nokia invested in neither a modern ARM SoC, unlike Apple and Qualcomm and Samsung, nor in LTE baseband chipsets, nor in foundry relationships unlike again Apple, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
Nokia the phone company was a dead man walking in 2008 long before Elop got there.
Nokia owns over 50% of LTE patens and makes more profits than Ericsson with less revenue. Try again.
For all the clueless, here's a short list of non-asian electronics companies (some historical):
Seimens (Germany), Philips (Netherlands), Nokia (Finaland), Ericsson (Sweden), Zenith (USA), RCA (USA), Sennheiser (Germany), Emerson (USA), Magnavox (USA), Bose (USA), Audiovox (USA), Avaya (USA), Marconi (UK)
List is here for more
Wooooo ... 5% of the world didn't know of Nokia until they became the largest cellphone manufacturer.
Yeah, I'm sure they were a household name in India, China, Brazil and Russia too... [/sarcasm]
Seriously, if more than 10% of the world's population (and I'm being generous) had ever heard of Nokia prior to them getting into cell phones I'd be shocked.