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Nokia Agrees to Buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6B
- tiernano 11y agoThat was quick... there there rumors just last week...
- ghshephard 11y agoRumors typically only become public as the deal is closing, and more people are brought in to do the work on it. The fact that there were rumors was a strong indication that the deal was about to take place.
- rnl 11y agoNot quite, Apple was rumored to be buying Tesla, which would have made sense considering thier cash reserves, however the deal never happened.
- ghshephard 11y agoIndication, but not guarantee. The point I was really trying to make, is that rumors typically don't leak at the very early stage, when there are limited people involved. The point at which rumors do start occurring, is at the very final, final stages - and so it's not surprising that a deal is closed soon after the rumors start leaking.
- gilgoomesh 11y agoApple rumors are not a typical example. There's a whole industry of idiots "analysts" who do nothing but release click-bait speculation about Apple.
- kgwgk 11y agoThere were rumors already in December. And in September. And in May. Speculations about Nokia acquiring parts of Alcatel-Lucent or the whole of it have been recurrent since the sale of their cellphone business to MSFT in 2013.
- funkyy 11y agoSounds like Nokia is looking for a way to prepare itself to enter the market with new products. Good news for Europeans for sure, since Nokia was the company that usually managed to translate products to European realities.
- CamperBob2 11y agoOr that they're looking to get into the patent trolling business.
- tormeh 11y agoI don't think this has any positive implications for a potential new Nokia handset business. It is, however, possibly bad news for Ericsson and Huawei.
- i_have_to_speak 11y agoValued less than WhatsApp!
- blumkvist 11y agoIncredible indeed.
- moondowner 11y agoDon't forget that in 2013 Microsoft bought Nokia's handset division for half of the price Nokia is paying now for Alcatel-Lucent.
- Aloha 11y agoI'd argue that the networks business is and always has had more long term value than handsets.
- digi_owl 11y agoLike i needed any more reason to distrust the stock market...
- vnglst 11y agoI don't really understand how this works. Microsoft bought Nokia for about $7B[1] and now Nokia pays more than twice that amount for Alcatel? Where is this money coming from and why is Alcatel worth so much more? [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia-acquisition-2014-4?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia-acquis...
- ghshephard 11y agoMicrosoft only bought the handset business from Nokia, they didn't purchase all of Nokia. In fact, as I recall, they only got the right to use some of the brand names for a limited period of time.
- vnglst 11y agoRight, that makes sense! And the Alcatel that Nokia is buying here, is much more than a producer of phones.
- yaantc 11y agoActually the Alcatel-Lucent they bought do not produce phones at all ;) A while ago Alcatel got with TCL, a Chinese company, to take care of the handset business through a joint-venture initially. Then TCL bought and integrated the JV, and kept the rights to the Alcatel brand for handsets. The brand is likely to stay but it's now fully TCL (with still some ex-Alcatel employees).
- Aoyagi 11y agoDon't forget that Microsoft('s lackey) took care of lowering their value as much as possible before buying the Devices and Services unit for some spare change.
- dagw 11y agoCome on. Nokia was doing a fine job of lowering the value of their handset business on their own.
- pavlov 11y agoEssentially this means that Nokia won't get back into consumer hardware for a good while. The mapping division (Here) will probably be sold soon. The mobile networks business is now the primary driver at the company. They'll have their hands full trying to integrate the Alcatel-Lucent networks business with their existing assets. (Remember that Nokia's networks business today is already the result of a merger with Siemens and a purchase of Motorola's networks division, so they have some experience with that.) Nokia is now a formidable competitor to Ericsson and Huawei, but it won't be on Samsung's or Apple's radar again. I know that Nokia does license the Nokia brand to Foxconn for Android tablets sold in the Chinese market... But that's not a sign of life in Nokia's consumer ambitions any more than it is for other brand licensors like Kodak or Polaroid.
- moondowner 11y agoNokia's buying of AL probably means that they won't have to license the brand to Foxconn in order to make hardware. (The N1 is a pretty good tablet though.) Also worth noting is that AL ows a pretty big pool of patents, so I'm not sure what was Nokia's main motivation.
- yaantc 11y agoALU doesn't produce handsets anymore. Alcatel sold their handset business to TCL a while ago, and TCL has the rights to the brand for handsets. So even if the Alcatel name will disappear on the network side, it's likely to remain on handsets but it's just a brand for TCL.
- n8m 11y agoI just hope whoever buys HERE doesn't screw it up. At the moment I do like them more than the google maps. They are also cheaper when it comes to licenses.
- pavlov 11y agoI think Samsung will pick up Here. Seems like a bargain for them. Samsung has been slowly building up their own "shadow stack" for mobile. They have everything from the OS up, but map data is a huge missing piece. Also, I think Samsung's homegrown Tizen OS has some ambitions on the automobile side, and that's a market where Here has been doing well.
- ulfw 11y agoSo it's Nokia-Siemens-Alcatel-Lucent? A powerhouse!
- masklinn 11y agoSiemens is still Siemens, and Nokia bought Siemens's shares in NSN (renaming it Nokia Networks) in 2013.
- raverbashing 11y agoYes, they're still going down the drain It's a company that has no speed to compete in the modern world See what divisions they closed/sold off in the past years Can't say I'm sorry
- fubar313 11y agoYou forgot Bell Labs.
- ccozan 11y agoand some Motorola parts too!
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kpil 11y agoHans Vesterberg, the current CEO of Ericsson noted that 10 years ago Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel, Lucent and Motorola was Ericsson largest competitors, all more or less the same size. Now the merged Nokia is as big as Ericsson. Almost. 10 years ago Huawei was busy stealing^^^inventing new technology, but now they are more or less the same size as Ericsson, but growing like hell.
- ksec 11y agoSo basically now Nokia, Erisson, Huawei or ZTE ( Are there any others ) actually build and run the Network Backend of Mobile Network, while Mobile / Cell Operators does the sales, marketing and customer services?
- Aloha 11y agoSamsung - and there are a ton of companies that do builds that dont make hardware, like General Dynamics (who does just about everything)
- Swannie 11y agoThere are. Cisco and others are getting into the small cell space. Not that many people realize that Samsung are in to building base stations. Cisco have always been in the back haul, core mobile routing space, along with Juniper, and some others smaller players.
- ck2 11y agoPatents. That's what this has to be about. Produce little to nothing and just sue for royalties on other manufacturers.
- simonturvey 11y agoJust because you can't see the Nokia logo on the cell towers and base stations doesn't mean we don't make them. I'll take physical evidence and a balance sheet over dumb stuff like this.
- chipotle_coyote 11y agoI think you -- and others who haven't checked, which is understandable -- imagine that after Nokia sold their handset business to Microsoft, nothing was left but a tiny little husk. If that were true, your assumption would probably be correct, but it isn't. Nokia ended 2014 with over 60,000 employees worldwide and nearly €13B in revenue. They're still a really big company. Sure, they make some money from patent licensing -- as do all companies of that size -- but the vast majority of their revenue comes from network equipment and services.
- Aloha 11y agoFor example, If you use T-Mobile in some markets, that's Nokia-Siemens, if you use AT&T, thats also NSN, plus ALU - Verizon, ALU, Sprint, Samsung, Ericsson or ALU depends on market. They make very very real, very expensive products.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- alphadevx 11y agoI'm curious to know what this means for a potential Palm revival now, given this: http://www.webosnation.com/its-confirmed-tcl-bringing-back-palm http://www.webosnation.com/its-confirmed-tcl-bringing-back-p...
- ed_blackburn 11y agoI was an under graduate engineer at Nortel Networks in the late nineties and early nougties writing code and building rigs to automate the testing of OC192 tx / rx components before they were assembled and usually dropped under the ocean. I was amazed at the capabilities of this hardware and the next generation from both Nortel and its competitors,like Lucent. It amazes me what is achievable but not viable for mass production. Or desirable by customers (good enough). An industry that matters so much. With no backbone there is no network in so many places. Perhaps a few mergers will unlock the doors?
- yaiu 11y agoPlan 9 changes hands
- bwindels 11y agoPlan 9 was licensed under the GPLv2 last year: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/plan_9_moves_to_gnu_space/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/14/plan_9_moves_to_gnu_...
- stonogo 11y agoLucent still holds the copyright, regardless of which licenses they apply.
- digi_owl 11y agoHmm, a cluster of P9P linked mobile devices...
- steamy 11y agoIt looks like a merger deal to me with Nokia having the upper hand than an acquisition.
- chernevik 11y agoIt's possible that the French government's approval of the deal is a dim glimmer of deregulation: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38b9dbf6-e2bd-11e4-bf4b-00144feab7de.html#axzz3XNGZS6SG http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38b9dbf6-e2bd-11e4-bf4b-00144... As tangents go this is an important one. Structural issues are strangling European growth and employment. Reform in France alone would make a big difference, and help pave the way for truly screwed up economies like Italy and Spain.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoNokia recently auctioned off literal tons of engineering equipment. Looks like they closed a huge engineering facility in Oulu, Finland. A lot of it looked like obsolete stuff (like for a big product line sustaining-engineering group). I don't know enough about cellular to say whether or how much of the stuff was really useful for new product development; but some of the equipment looked very recent. The only thing that I inferred at the time was that T&M resellers are going to have a better year than Rhode & Schwarz. http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of-communication-testers%2c-analyzers%2c-oscilloscopes%2c-ge/656/ http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of-com...
- TorKlingberg 11y agoThat looks like equipment from Nokia's handset division ramping down.
- jacquesm 11y agoThere's some very sweet gear in that auction, pity I didn't know about it earlier :(
- eitally 11y agoThis is interesting, and probably good. These are two companies that make sense to consolidate, especially as both eye developing markets in SE Asia & Africa, and especially those markets that are open to Chinese development monies+influence (mostly in Africa). On the integration side of things, yes, it will probably be a little challenging from a business systems & personnel point of view if they really want to become a single-faced corporation, but on the manufacturing & engineering side I think it'll be pretty easy. I don't know if my company is the largest EMS partner for either one, but I do know that both Nokia (otherwise referred to as NSN, Nokia-Siemens Networks) and ALU are both top-10 customers of ours, and collectively responsible for a couple billion in revenue. I mention this not because of anything to do with my company, but because both are already setup for effective automated integration with their EMS partners, so whatever they do on their side (e.g. changes to EDI rules/structure, ECO processes, NPI processes, etc) will be pretty easy to trickle down and deal with on our side. My hope is that Nokia become the business leader part of this acquisition, not Alcatel-Lucent. They are very challenging to work with sometimes.
- unfocused 11y agoI wonder what this means for Alcatel-Lucent here in Ottawa. I briefly worked there in 2001 right after Alcatel bought out Newbridge. There is a strong networking division there designing some of those large backbone "routers".
- jd3 11y agoSo Nokia owns Bell Labs now? What a world we live in.
- liotier 11y agoOnly two major mobile telecom equipment manufacturers left. Great news for Huawei !
- uberneo 11y agoAlcatel bought Lucent .. Microsoft bought Nokia .. now Nokia bought Alcatel-Lucent .. All mixed up
- shmerl 11y agoMore patent trolling coming?
- peteratt 11y agoHERE engineer here (yes, I also sometimes hate the noticeable amount of redundancy of our corporate brand). One important point that analysts haven't stressed enough while evaluating potential buyers, is the role our top customers play in all this dance. By top customers I'm referring to car manufacturers in particular. They are the ones who are paying/will pay top dollar for our connected car offerings. A sale to a single car manufacturer would make the rest go away. A sale to Google, for example, would completely destroy our trust – these guys hate Google. A sale to Uber... Same thing. Facebook, maybe? They've been known for respecting independence of acquired companies to a high degree. That could be one of our best shots IMO.
- chipotle_coyote 11y agoIs it perceived as a given that Nokia's going to dump HERE? I used to be with the Point & Find group, which is what became City Lens -- my impression is that they were working on a quasi-secret project all last year, some kind of outdoor adventure thing, but I noticed last month that just about everyone I'd worked with changed their LinkedIn status to things no longer associated with Nokia/HERE.
- sirkneeland 11y agoYeah, that was canned.
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- jackbravo 11y agoAlcatel is one of the main companies that sells FirefoxOS phones here in México. I wonder if it is the same in other countries. And I wonder if this will affect FirefoxOS in the long run? Will they switch to Windows?
- grok2 11y agoAlcatel is not in the phone handset business anymore -- it is just the name that is being used by other manufacturers (perhaps TCL).
- legulere 11y agoFor me this can be seen as a symptom of the problem with technology companies today: If you're too small you won't be able to survive. So everyone gets bought so that they don't die. In the end you have a few big companies splitting up the market under themselves and the hurdles for a market entry are too high. An even better example for this are semiconductor foundries.
- f00fc0d3 11y agoBeginning of the end of Nokia Networks. Looks like they dont have any clue what to do. ALU enodeb is crap, Nokia ancient Flexi is crap and their new stuff will be crap if they will manage to sell this to somebody :-)