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

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.