To: Maurice Winn who wrote (64565 ) 7/15/2010 4:47:56 AM From: elmatador Respond to of 217544 Carving up N. America telecoms. After NT Nokia Siemens trumps Huawei in Motorola courtship Rumoured to be discussing a bid for Motorola's Networks division for between $1.1 and $1.3 billion Back in April, Huawei appeared to have an agreement with Motorola to buy its Networks division, and was supposed to be sitting down with officials of the Obama administration to find ways to satisfy them that sensitive security contracts could be hived away in a separate unit supervised only by US citizens. But this week the Wall Street Journal reports that according to insiders the way has been cleared for Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) to take over discussions and is pursing its own deal with Motorola. NSN is a joint venture with Siemens, run by Finland's Nokia. We have to assume that either Huawei's attempts at a "mitigation agreement" similar to one signed by Alcatel when it acquired Lucent foundered on the detail, or the Chinese company got cold feet when it saw the state of Motorola's orders book. Whatever happened the deal has cooled and NSN is said to be discussing buying the Networks arm for between $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion, and a deal could be reached in the next few weeks. Motorola is due to split into two publicly traded units in Q1 2011 with Mobile Devices and Home being merged and renamed Motorola Mobility and Enterprise Mobility and Networks (cellular infrastructure) set to merge and trade under the name Motorola Solutions. It has always been assumed that the Networks business would be sold off shortly after the split. Immediately analysts have seen this as a reason to slam Nokia, pushing down its shares on the logic that it is getting mixed up in a new kind of business in the form of Motorola's ailing iDEN technology at Nextel and the fact that its mostly supports CDMA2000 networks rather than the dominant W-CDMA networks which NSN goes after. Another fear is that Nokia will over-aggressively chase contracts in the US and overspend. But the logic can clearly be made to work. Both Motorola and NSN have a presence in the aging, but still active low-end GSM/EDGE business which predominate in the third world, and both are trying to make it in advanced LTE networks. Motorola, along with Samsung, Huawei and Alvarion, lead in the WiMAX market, and have argued convincingly that this expertise will position it strongly for LTE, owing to the similarities of the two standards. And overnight NSN would be able to knock on the door of any of the US cellular operators for business, rather than just those using W-CDMA, such as AT&T and T-Mobile. It might also help NSN leapfrog Huawei back into global second place in cellular infrastructure, behind leader Ericsson. In Networks, Motorola suffers from some of the same problems which afflicted Nortel - it has a relatively small market share in a business which increasingly depends on scale. This was perhaps why NSN bid, but failed, to land Nortel's wireless assets, which went last year to Ericsson. That failure perhaps proves that Nokia will not only not overbid, it will not overspend if it lands the deal, since it was Nokia's caution that stopped it from beating out Ericsson for the Nortel assets. We have to assume that either Huawei's attempts at a "mitigation agreement" similar to one signed by Alcatel when it acquired Lucent foundered on the detail, or the Chinese company got cold feet when it saw the state of Motorola's orders book. Whatever happened the deal has cooled and NSN is said to be discussing buying the Networks arm for between $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion, and a deal could be reached in the next few weeks. Motorola is due to split into two publicly traded units in Q1 2011 with Mobile Devices and Home being merged and renamed Motorola Mobility and Enterprise Mobility and Networks (cellular infrastructure) set to merge and trade under the name Motorola Solutions. It has always been assumed that the Networks business would be sold off shortly after the split. Immediately analysts have seen this as a reason to slam Nokia, pushing down its shares on the logic that it is getting mixed up in a new kind of business in the form of Motorola's ailing iDEN technology at Nextel and the fact that its mostly supports CDMA2000 networks rather than the dominant W-CDMA networks which NSN goes after. Another fear is that Nokia will over-aggressively chase contracts in the US and overspend. But the logic can clearly be made to work. Both Motorola and NSN have a presence in the aging, but still active low-end GSM/EDGE business which predominate in the third world, and both are trying to make it in advanced LTE networks. Motorola, along with Samsung, Huawei and Alvarion, lead in the WiMAX market, and have argued convincingly that this expertise will position it strongly for LTE, owing to the similarities of the two standards. And overnight NSN would be able to knock on the door of any of the US cellular operators for business, rather than just those using W-CDMA, such as AT&T and T-Mobile. It might also help NSN leapfrog Huawei back into global second place in cellular infrastructure, behind leader Ericsson. In Networks, Motorola suffers from some of the same problems which afflicted Nortel - it has a relatively small market share in a business which increasingly depends on scale. This was perhaps why NSN bid, but failed, to land Nortel's wireless assets, which went last year to Ericsson. That failure perhaps proves that Nokia will not only not overbid, it will not overspend if it lands the deal, since it was Nokia's caution that stopped it from beating out Ericsson for the Nortel assets.