Nokia To Buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 Billion

totalcaos sends news that Nokia has announced plans to buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6 billion worth of stock. Both companies have approved the transaction, though now they must wait for regulatory approval. They said they expect the deal to close in the first half of 2016. The combined company is expected to become the world’s second-largest telecom equipment manufacturer behind Ericsson of Sweden, with global revenues totaling $27 billion and operations spread across Asia, Europe and North America. The companies are betting that, by joining forces, they can better compete against Chinese and European rivals bidding to provide telecom hardware and software to the world’s largest carriers, including AT&T and Verizon in the United States, Vodafone and Orange in Europe, and SoftBank in Japan. ... Analysts say that Nokia has progressively focused on its equipment unit, which now represents roughly 85 percent of the company’s annual revenue. On Wednesday, Nokia confirmed that it had put its digital maps business — a competitor for Google Maps — up for sale.

Comments

More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying more patents for microsoft?

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Microsoft have to do with it?

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

From "Nokia" on Wikipedia:

"In September 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia's mobile phone business as part of an overall deal totaling €5.44 billion (US$7.17 billion).[7][8] Stephen Elop, Nokia's former CEO, and several other executives joined the new Microsoft Mobile subsidiary of Microsoft as part of the deal, which was completed on 25 April 2014.[9]"

The above is common knowledge in the tech industries. Even SlashDot has covered this. So have countless tech web sites, blogs, and even business news sources. Please try to keep up.

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

EVERYTHING!!

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Shakrai]

Nokia's mobile phone business is not the whole enterprise. Far from it. :) Same with Motorola and Motorola Mobility, incidentally. Random stupid story: Visiting a friend of mine in Turku, noted that he was a complete Apple Fanboy. iPad, iPhone, iBook, the works. He doubtless has or will soon have an Apple Watch.

"Yki, what's with all the apple stuff? You're the reason Nokia is dying."
*ten seconds of silence*, "Fuck you."

Game, set, and match. :P

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

From "Nokia" on Wikipedia:

"In September 2013, Microsoft announced that it would acquire Nokia's mobile phone business as part of an overall deal totaling €5.44 billion (US$7.17 billion).[7][8] Stephen Elop, Nokia's former CEO, and several other executives joined the new Microsoft Mobile subsidiary of Microsoft as part of the deal, which was completed on 25 April 2014.[9]"

The above is common knowledge in the tech industries. Even SlashDot has covered this. So have countless tech web sites, blogs, and even business news sources. Please try to keep up.

This is not their mobile phone business.

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is indeed common knowledge, but what is the connection between Microsoft and this deal?

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no connection.

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Stormwatch]

That's nonsense. Stephen Elop was the reason for Nokia's downfall.

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Shakrai]

I'm glad you interpreted my bad one line joke at the expense of a friend as an in-depth analysis of Nokia's bad business decisions.....

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

Further while Microsoft bought their mobile phone business, they have since rebranded it under the Microsoft name. No models are being released with the Nokia branding anymore - some of the old models may still carry Nokia (like my 928) but the new ones are all under the Microsoft name.

The Nokia that was left was the one that made the actual cell networks, not the phones, is the business that is buying Lucent. Nokia didn't sell their patents to Microsoft, further the patent license deal was good for "a 10-year license to its patents at the time of the closing". So any new patents that Nokia happens to gain are not available for Microsoft to use unless they do a new licensing deal.

So there is no apparent connection between Microsoft and this, nor does this grant Microsoft any more patents.

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you get for visiting Turku.

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Stormwatch]

I thought Turku was some alternative spelling of Turkey. :P

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[Shakrai]

It's one of the largest cities in Finland, which is the home country of Nokia....

Re:More patents for microsoft?

[gl4ss]

in the "more advanced" tech circles(on slashdot) we discussed though which parts of nokia actually were sold to Microsoft(basically, the part that made windows phones), not the networks part. ironically, the networks part had been doing not so good for a few years BUT was ok and is still kind of OK when microsoft crap was dumped on nokia. Also to note, the networks part was called Nokia Siemens Networks due to a merger a while back(fairly recently the requirement to keep siemens in the name expired).

which maybe begs the question, why the fuck did Microsoft even buy it? well, to make _sure_ that Nokia didn't bring any more android phones to the market(x,x+,x xl, x2 in asian markets were released shortly before the takeover). for Nokia it gave the possibility to shed thousands and thousands of people and dump them to be microsofts problem(and microsoft has since been firing them out of a cannon on the job market). without the deal, even with Elop the Trojan at the helm, it was unsure if _anyone_ would have been producing Windows Phones anymore. However, you could also then ask why Microsoft didn't just start buying phones from a contract manufacturer and sell them with their own name(which is what they're effectively doing now anyways!! since they dumped the nokia name from the microsoft phones and it runs a full microsoft stack AND they didn't even buy the Maps portion of the old Nokia! they're still paying for using that shit)

also, Nokia that remains is barred from selling Nokia branded phones for a few years. they're free to sell a Nokia branded tablet though and they are doing that(also running Android).

AlCaLukia will be wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll be selling a large number of wonderful overlapping lines of equipment in a wonderful industry with fabulous growth prospects, and they can expect dynamic leadership continuing with tradition of super-competent CEOs in the individual companies before the merger.

Should I buy 5000 or 10000 shares of stock?

Re:AlCaLukia will be wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

and synergies

Re:AlCaLukia will be wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

I tend to avoid investing in tech companies, but I always avoid any company that uses synergy in their mainline communication.

I'm not joking.

Re:AlCaLukia will be wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

What about leverage. I cannot leverage?

I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

So how can "Nokia" now be buying another company for $16 Billion?

I'm sure there is a perfectly logical explanation for this - could someone enlighten me?

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[TheRaven64]

Nokia is a huge telecoms company that is most well known by consumers for making mobile phone handsets, though this was a relatively small part of their total product line. Microsoft bought the mobile handset division. Then remainder of the company has a market cap of around $30bn. This means that, including stock, they easily have enough capital to buy another company for $16bn (the $7bn in cash from MS probably helped though).

It sounds like someone at Nokia realised that mobile phones were in a race to the bottom and the profit is in the back-end infrastructure.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[dugancent]

Microsoft bought Nokia's devices and services unit, not the entire company.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Shakrai]

It sounds like someone at Nokia realised that mobile phones were in a race to the bottom and the profit is in the back-end infrastructure.

Not quite. They ran their mobile phone business into the ground by clinging to yesterday at the expense of today and tomorrow. Clinging to Symbian when Android emerged was a mistake, one that they should have realized, but who wants to admit they've been out-thought? Same story as Motorola Mobility, incidentally, both outfits made superior headsets in the areas that really matter (ever try to destroy a Nokia phone? They were built like tanks. And Motorola handsets had the best radios ever made, take one alongside a Samsung into the wilderness and see who drops the connection first.....) but they failed to market them effectively and got crushed by inferior Samsung products.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia handsets are perhaps small in profit, but surely not small in volume. (checks) http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2944819

Yes, 43 million phones sold in Q3 2014, so roughly 170 million phones for the year, putting Nokia second behind Samsung in phone sales.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

They did not. Microsoft bought Nokia's mobile phone business unit.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[TheRaven64]

Symbian still runs circles around Linux as a kernel for mobile devices, the problem was failing to update the userland APIs to something that didn't constrain developers heavily so that code could scale down to devices with under 2MB of total memory when every phone started shipping with 256-512MB as a minimum. The systematic problem was that Nokia had at least four separate projects to replace the Symbian userspace with something modern, all handled by teams that did their best to sabotage the efforts of the others - very successfully, I might add. You can't run a company in a competitive market when your middle management is more interested in competing with other groups within the company than with other companies.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Shakrai]

Symbian still runs circles around Linux as a kernel for mobile devices

Betamax was arguably superior to VHS but that mattered not a whit once VHS had a critical mass of users.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Uecker]

They didn't run their mobile phone business into the ground by clinging to symbian. In fact, they had a great successor already ready: Meego. They killed themselves by: 1) switching to Windows Phone, which was already failing on the market, and at that point in time was in no way competitive 2) already declaring Symbian to be dead before they had working Windows Phones ready 3) refusing to sell the N9 in major markets also it was a clear hit and could have brought in a lot of cash 4) having Windows Phones which initially had a lot of bugs and problems 5) screwing over the few customers who bought their initial Windows phones by not upgrading to Windows Phone 8, 6) having only few very similar smartphones etc....

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[ArmoredDragon]

Betamax was inferior in one big way though: It only held up to an hour of video, meaning a typical feature length release had to be split across two tapes.

Granted they fixed this problem with a new higher capacity tape, it was only after VHS (which never had this problem) had already overwhelmed the market.

LaserDisc, which was superior to both betamax and VHS in terms of quality, also only held up to an hour of video, and thus it had the same problem Betamax originally had.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[ArmoredDragon]

There was a book called "The Fall and Decline of Nokia" (didn't read it, but read a summary) which basically said that going with Windows Phone was a (and I quote) "catastrophic mistake". Apparently they went with WP because they were afraid of competing with Samsung. However it seemed that their only two entries into Android have done rather well so far (Nokia X and Nokia N1) so that was probably a mistaken opinion. The Nokia X line only stopped because Microsoft killed it after they owned it.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Shakrai]

The point is that having a superior product (which is debatable in the case of Nokia's OS, but whatever) is no guarantee of market success. Google had the critical mass to make their OS work and it's a mystery to me why Nokia couldn't see that. Or, for that matter, why Blackberry and Microsoft still can't.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[ArmoredDragon]

Having been stuck with a Lumia 521 for the past 4 days, I see exactly why Microsoft can't: It's just a watered down, crappy OS.

Its only positive side is that it runs fluid on older hardware, but other than that it just can't pull off shit. In the cases where the app you need is available for WP, the API features needed to support all of the same features it has on Android just don't exist. So nice apps I use like Endomondo are missing a shitload of features, and no amount of work on the part of the developer can change that. (A huge thing that is missing: Inter-app communication.)

Not only that, but the base OS itself is rather light on features. Little things, like for example you can't set custom tones for texts, emails, calendar events, etc.

Also the whole "live tile" system sucks ass. Live tiles aren't actually live (more like 15 minutes behind, where Android widgets ARE live) and for most apps, there's no point in the larger size, and apps that are best for lists (like a calendar agenda) work like shit compared to their Android variant because tiles can't display vertically like Android widgets can, so like the calendar tile only shows one event at a time. And then tiles that preview things (like email) flip through objects so unless you happen to look directly at it, you might not be seeing your newest email. Fortunately they (kind of) copied Android's notification system to address these shortcomings, but theirs is shitty in comparison (for example, no object grouping.)

Another thing is that the OS can't multitask for shit. If you download a file that is going to take a while, you can't do ANYTHING else, you just have to sit there and watch the progress bar. If you try to do anything else, it'll just stop the download.

It really is a lame OS. There really is no reason to use it as your daily driver unless you're just a big fan of Microsoft and/or you really hate all things Google.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[LoRdTAW]

Symbian still runs circles around Linux as a kernel for mobile devices, ...

Runs circles around how exactly?

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[TheRaven64]

Power management that didn't suck, a sane capability-oriented security model, a realtime nanokernel that allowed you to run the baseband and application stack on the same core, to name a few.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[danomac]

Nobody said how big the circle was. Maybe it's spinning in one place?

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Darinbob]

Microsoft only bought one portion, the mobile phones division.

However I am a bit confused as the original Nokia Networks was merged with a Siemen's division to become Nokia Siemens Networks, an independent company (though certainly with a lot of shared board members).

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[sootman]

LaserDisc's biggest problem was that it was read-only. Compared to "I can watch AND record ANYTHING", the market for "I can only watch studio films" was tiny. AFAIK, the very first LaserDiscs were one hour PER SIDE, so even the first model could hold a 2-hour movie on a single disc. That was the point of its existence.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

VHS only won in the consumer market. Betacam (derived form Betamax) dominated the broadcast industry. It is still sees use in the field and is the primary archive format. The technology also saw wide use in digital cinematography before the move to sold state storage.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, they ran their cellphones business into the ground through bad decisions, and then they sold if off to the suckers at Microsoft, and kept the huge part of the company that is still quite successful.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia bought Siemens' 50% stake in 2013.

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[playminecraftforfree]

How Symbian runs circles around Linux?

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, but lumias run smoothly for days without a charge, browse faster and do almost everything better than android counterpart.

Unless you use your phone heavily as a productivity tool and what to have a lot of live widgets and installed apps that suck up your battery life. Having a real OS as a core has it's advantages in such situations, but also have a price, that you have to have a monster phone with high specs to run it smoothly and of course, you have to be permanently tied to a socket wall to keep your charge.

Since I left android for lumia I have not had a single OS hang, missed calls, depleted battery a saturday night or have reboot the fricking phone to make an urgent call. So yes, Android is great as a mini computer but sucks ball when it comes to be a decent mobile phone (emphasis on mobile and phone).

Re:I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Hognoxious]

It didn't help that building a user-facing app that worked properly and had a decent UI was beyond them.

I had an E71, what a bastard.

Re: I thought MSFT bought Nokia for $7 Billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Poorly.

No mobile devices

[Grizzley9]

To stave off further misunderstandings, Nokia sold it's handset division to MS a while ago. Alcatel licenses it's brand to other handsets as well. Neither company has a handset division though and so any mobile or desktop phone devices are in name only. This new company will focus on enterprise telecom infrastructure.

Good

[Grizzley9]

Thankfully the company won't be headquartered in France (though French government is promising no French jobs lost). This will hopefully help remove the disproportionate amount of employees there, at least eventually. /current ALU employee in US

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't you prefer living in France?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't you prefer living in France?

I think op is referring to the french divisions inabillity to organize a piss up in a brewery or do anything productive for most of the summer months, but op is having to be nice because being employed at a fragmented disjointed company is still better than being unemployed.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Working for a multinational based in Germany, I will say that all of Western Europe becomes unproductive in the summer months and the December/January period. I am always amazed how European companies actually produce anything of value considering how little their employees work over there. Our German counterparts seem to have a national holiday every week and they take many 2-4 week vacations. Our French operations personnel only work half the year. Few Europeans actually read work related email off-hours and you can forget about getting in touch with them over the weekend unless you are letting them know the building has burned to the ground and they don't have to report back on Monday.

Re:Good

[Kergan]

Dude... Get a life. That's how we live on this side of the pond. And you should too,for your own health and sanity, and that or your family.

Re:Good

[Plammox]

I used to work here in Europe for a company based somewhere on the US-west coast. Meeting invitations from 8 to 11PM were the norm on every workday, usually called by american employees in the office who didnt realize or bother too much about the time difference. Most of the meetings had the purpose of reaffirming the importance of the US-employee meeting organizer and generally, there was a lot of unproductive and inefficient blathering going on.

Yeah, you work long hours, but man, you also really waste a lot of your time in the office for the sake of looking busy and important.

Just keep repeating that myth about the lazy Europeans on the brink of financial disaster to yourselves. Those 4-6 weeks of vacation per year really are destroying the economies of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, UK and Ireland....right?? :-)

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words: they have a life besides work and still they manage to be more productive than their colleagues at the other side of the pond. Workaholism is a national disease in the U.S. and it hurts productivity more than it helps it.

Navteq

[Anonymous Coward]

The maps data business was Navteq, acquired for 8 billion or so. A competitor to Google, Microsoft, TomTom primarily. Be interested in seeing who pushes in the poker chips to acquire. A new player, or an old player to eliminate competition? My guess is Apple or Google or investors backing the many start-ups based on opensource routing of open street data. Ordnance Survey to get into global?

Re:Navteq

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody wants it. If it were actually valuable Nokia would have made a go of it. Mapping is 90% grunt work. There's no point in buying a mapping company that has fallen behind.

Re:Navteq

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is very valuable, it is used in many places and devices. I don't understand why they would let it go. Really the only one i see buying it is microsoft or apple. MS does have their own bing maps already, but buying Here they'd make it much better. Google has their own, they have no interest. Apple could buy it since their maps aren't as good as bing or google. Samsung is very unlikely since they moved to use MS crap programs in their phones.

Re:Navteq

[ArmoredDragon]

Isn't Nokia running the mapping services that most Windows Phone users prefer? Apparently Bing Maps leaves a lot to be desired. It would probably be in Microsoft's interests to acquire it. Trouble is, it's a money loser, and so far everything Nokia has given to Microsoft is a money loser.

Re:Navteq

[LessThanObvious]

So, Google gets to win at maps and we are just stuck with it? I can understand where can't very well offer free mapping software as a service for the whole planet and have multiple companies struggling to get people to use their version. I do hope for an alternate future where Google maps isn't the only game in town for mobile, but if Microsoft can't compete, I'm not sure who else ever will. It's not that I don't like Google Maps, but the less competition, the more leverage they have to disrespect our privacy.

Re:Navteq

[Anonymous Coward]

the mapping services that most Windows Phone users prefer?

Are there enough Windows Phone users to produce any meaningful statistics?

Re:Navteq

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is very valuable

No it isn't. It generated gross income of less than a billion dollars last year, and after expenses was a net money loser.

Spin maps unit off to venture capital

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't sell it to Google, who will just shutter it, or to Yahoo or HP, who won't know what to do with it.

What's going to happen, if this deal goes on...

[Anonymous Coward]

... There are going to be massive layoffs, but since the Nokia executives don't give a damn, and the frogs won't back down, all the layoffs are going to be from Usa, Finland and other places. Nokia promises to keep the HQ at Finland, but that's it. Few years go by and the HQ will have to be moved to froggieland. The same useless shit alcatel has been doing will continue, because the Nokia executives didn't learn anything from losing their mobile business.

There'll be layers and layers of useless bosses and strikes like the french like to do. The whole India thing will be repeated. Trying to layoff any french will suddenly cause weird backtaxes, that never existed before.

Nokia will be another piece of shit company.

Re:What's going to happen, if this deal goes on...

[Grizzley9]

... There are going to be massive layoffs, but since the Nokia executives don't give a damn, and the frogs won't back down, all the layoffs are going to be from Usa, Finland and other places. Nokia promises to keep the HQ at Finland, but that's it. Few years go by and the HQ will have to be moved to froggieland. The same useless shit alcatel has been doing will continue, because the Nokia executives didn't learn anything from losing their mobile business.

There'll be layers and layers of useless bosses and strikes like the french like to do. The whole India thing will be repeated. Trying to layoff any french will suddenly cause weird backtaxes, that never existed before.

Nokia will be another piece of shit company.

Sounds about right. As a current employee, the power that the French gov has over businesses to keep employees has been a damper on our operations. We just went through a lot of layoffs to make us presentable for sale. Now we'll likely be going through more sadly.

Dedicated Symbian user here

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a Nokia C6-01, the touchscreen. The slider with thumb keyboard C6-00 has similar features.

I do about 250 minutes a month, with that kind of usage I have to charge the phone but once a week. Small enough to slip in front pocket, I can read the WSJ and NYT. Streams radio stations, cbc.ca NPR WLS etc. Full SMB compatibility, great Win + Mac file manager. Wonderful camera in good light, much better than ANY Motorola Android. Beautiful file management with BT. WiFi connectivity better than any iPhone or Android. Facetard + NitTwitter apps.

Hard to believe on the tiny screen, but it's easier to text on it than any iPhone. Very responsive and precise screen. Multiple GMail accounts are just great on my phone.

Bad thing is MS cancelled Skype for Symbian, oh well, what do you expect from MS.

Would they be startegic mind-setted ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Future of telco is in SDN and NFV Cloud compliant solutions.
Alcatel-Lucent may provide a lot there, both in terms of solutions (i.e. Nuage - OpenStack/Neutron NFV stuff - in other things...) than in terms of experience, teams expertises and vision.
Back to the title question, I believe Nokia have seen a gem, and will do the effort to make it a pure diamond. So, the answer is currently yes by default.
Now, from some previous comments, I will add the next 2 points :
- obviously it is definitely safer (for both business and technology stakes) that headquarter will move as far of France (or what remains of it) as possible for now.
- but also bear in mind that Alcatel could have not existed in other countries.
Such a waste...
Such a shame... ...but good luck to all the budies and the technos.
Cheers from France,
-B.

16.6 billion

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheaper than WhatsApp...

New company name ...

[Anonymous Coward]

And in a moment of marketing genius, the have named the new company using initials of the three old companies ... ANL. (Hehe)