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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.
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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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....