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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.
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?
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.
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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.
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
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's nonsense. Stephen Elop was the reason for Nokia's downfall.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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....
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.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
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).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.