Nokia Agrees to Buy Alcatel-Lucent for $16.6B
recode.net
recode.net
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.
Also worth noting is that AL ows a pretty big pool of patents, so I'm not sure what was Nokia's main motivation.
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.
Even now the current HERE Maps allows you to cache full countries for offline traveling and a bunch of other small features that add-up to leaving GM in the dust. Full offline caching has saved me in a number of situations. If Apple Maps wanted to compete with GM, they should buy HERE... and rename it to something better. It's been renamed about 4 times over the last 8 years.
Ericsson maybe, but Huawei is a juggernaut that leaves them in the dust (massive growth both in terms of revenue and innovation, especially in emerging markets) .Alcatel-Lucent was really struggling throughout its existence.
So yes Nokia squandered a huge lead in handset tech, but getting rid of the division has helped them a lot
Hell, Samsung basically had to go on a marketing blitz to get where they are right now.
I should know, I was PM on it.
With more developers starting to port their apps to the Windows platform, I'm considering going back to it.
Just as a comparison:
Display Pixel Density Lumia Icon: 441 Google Nexus 6 (new): 493
Camera Lumia Icon: 20MB Google Nexus 6 (new): 13MB
Processor: Lumia Icon: Quad core, 2200 MHz, Krait 400 Google Nexus 6 (new): Quad core, 2700 MHz, Krait 450
System Memory: Lumia Icon: 2048 MB RAM Google Nexus 6 (new): 3072 MB RAM
Keep in mind the Lumia was released in February 2014, The Nexus 6 was in November of 2015
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.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-closes-nokia-acquis...
Nokia in 2007-2010 was spending many times more than Apple on R&D. For that money, they got multiple infighting operating system teams each developing their own half-baked thing (Symbian, MeeGo, Qt, S40) and device teams that were building uncompetitive devices on top of 3-year-old software.
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/06/the-fin...
There was just no reason to write a memo like that. It destroyed their business, almost singlehandedly, and no, I'm not exaggerating. The consequences of that memo were insane: Nokia's handset sales died all over the world all at once.
In Q4 2010, Nokia stuffed the channel with outdated products. In a market that was growing accustomed to iPhone and Android, Nokia tried to sell consumers products based on the first touch edition of Symbian S60 -- the same software that was considered outdated when it first shipped in Nokia 5800 years earlier. (Because of the way Nokia's product development pipeline worked, the mid-range phones they released in late 2010 contained software that was several years old.)
Isn't it possible that Nokia's Q1 2011 sales crashed simply because the channel was full of Symbian phones that just were not selling? As CEO, Elop would have visibility into that when he wrote his infamous memo.
A point against the "evil memo destroyed sales" theory is that purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime. When they stopped buying Nokia's phones in Q1 2011, the decision was already made earlier.
Even if the burning platform concept was correct, releasing it in a companywide email instead of strategically shifting the company and then announcing the change in a measured, considered fashion would've been much better for their cash flows.
Purchasers at large operators don't turn on a dime, usually, but I would argue that the CEO of a handset manufacturer declaring their entire existing lineup of products is going to be discontinued in viscerally graphic terms is one of the things that might spur such quick change.
There was a very good reason to write it. Internally Nokia was delusional and confused, and desperately needed a wake-up call. Nothing less would have sufficed.
That only happened because of Elop's previous Microsoft connections and it was clearly the wrong decision for the shareholders of the company.
Q4 sales were higher than Q3 sales? I'm, uh... how about year-over-year comparisons? A seasonally-adjusted smoothed trendline? Anything OTHER than comparing sales figures in one quarter where there's Christmas and one quarter where there isn't?
Then the CEO was ousted, Elop brought in, and shit really hit the fan.
Then again, maybe Maemo should have just died at that point, rather than be resurrected as Mer/Sailfish. The whole thing produced ripples that seems set to yank the larger Linux community apart.
While Maemo was Debian in a mobile device, Mer/Sailfish at this point is as close to that as Android is.
While Maemo was Debian in a mobile device, Mer/Sailfish at
this point is as close to that as Android is.
This is why the Neo900 is so interesting and needed because for the first time, we could get modern hardware in the n900's perfect case, with the community Maemo OS. I just wish it was easier to develop for that operating system >_<
But the truth is that Symbian had simply been stagnant for too long and would never catch up and MeeGo for all its potential was just another platform with even less backing than WP and even less ready to be sold. Had they decided to really go for it with on of Symbian or MeeGo a few years earlier and gotten on the smartphone bandwagon then I might have my MeeGo Lumia device I so wanted, but they didn't and by the time they realized their mistake it was too late. As much as I hate to admit it and as much as it didn't necessarily work out very well, going with WP was probably a good decision at the time
Just out of curiosity, what do you mean "smartphone type stuff"? Symbian has been a smartphone OS since its inception.
At launch of iPhone Nokia had featurephones that were more capable.
And if one look at the current Android market, they may be right. Samsung is only where it is right now because of a massive marketing push in the last few years.
Did not compare in speed/pretty animations, collection of "apps", and marketing. What else? Would you like me to list how doesn't the latest iOS compare to latest Symbian?
So you're saying it was slow, kind of ugly, had no apps and the brand was so tainted that nobody wanted it.
Don't you think those are good reasons for abandoning Symbian?
So no, I don't think those are good reasons for abandoning any OS. Not for power-users anyway. iPhone is better in media consumption, that's it and that's what majority is after. And bandwagons, obviously.
The dialer was particularly awesome. It was the first time I saw a dialer that a) had untrained voice dialing and b) had vocal caller ID.
I had untrained voice dialing IN GREEK for years on my Nokia 701. And it actually worked correctly!
My brand new kitkat-soon-to-be-lolipop device cannot even voice dial English names.
I think that the truth is that: 1. The Finns got too cocky for their own good. 2. The forget to monitor the other guys. 3. Apple predictably made a smartphone (years after the ipod) and made a silly amount of money, and was dominating the high-end segment after a really short while. 4. Google decided to own the mobile ads market, and basically just not care about the hardware, and was starting to dominate virtually every other segment. 5. Nokia had a few platforms, some apps, and only the dying feature phone market, and they realized this.
They would have had a chance (maybe) to go for Android, but judging by for instance Sony (that I think build the best phones. period. ) it is really hard to compete with high-end stuff against Apple.
The "new" Nokia is Nokia Networks (http://networks.nokia.com/), so it's the company that supplies the ISPs with their infrastructure.
The bad feeling I have about this is that in the picture, Suri shakes hands with Hollande. That tells how political the deal is, and how wrong it can go (with all that protectionism etc).
On the other hand JTB says this is not good, so I have the instinct reaction that it must be good.
Nokia is also a telecommunication equipment designer and manufacturer (since long before cell phones even existed) similar to Ericsson, Huawei or Alcatel-Lucent. They also got into nav/geomapping after buying Navteq (then Ovi, currently HERE) but that's probably getting spun off.
http://www.equipnet.com/auctions/exceptional-offering-of-com...
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
edit: question mark
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.
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.
Produce little to nothing and just sue for royalties on other manufacturers.
They make very very real, very expensive products.