Microsoft finalised its acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone business in April 2014, and analysts believe Nokia may use cash from this deal to bid for the French vendor.
“[There is] market chatter that Nokia may bid for Alcatel to use the cash from its Microsoft deal,” a London-based trader told local reporters.
Nabila Popal, research manager at IDC MEA, said that Rajeev Suri, newly appointed CEO at Nokia, has previously hinted towards small acquisitions to fill in the gaps in Nokia’s product offering.
“One opportunity for Suri could be to decide what Nokia previously considered last year – taking over Alcatel-Lucent, the French-American company that announced in October a play to cut 10,000 jobs worldwide,” Popal said.
However, not all market watchers are so convinced of the deal, and one Amsterdam-based trader said of the rumours: “We’ve heard this before”.
In February 2014, Nokia was also thought to be eyeing the acquisition of UK-based Juniper Networks, which it extended its partnership with earlier this week.
Nokia and Juniper Network’s extended partnership unites Nokia’s Liquid Core solution; which utilises network function virtualisation (NFV), with Juniper’s data centre architecture; based on software defined networking (SDN).
“Nokia is a pioneer in telco cloud mobile networking solutions, establishing an unmatched track record in telco cloud innovation,” Suri said.
“By collaborating with Juniper, we are taking the next step together, enabling operators to take full advantage of the cloud with a clear path towards the robustness and scale of interconnected data centres.”
