Nokia Siemens to sell WiMAX business to NewNet

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 November 2011 08:18

IT Industry - Deals

Struggling telco infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks has announced plans to sell its WiMAX business - formerly owned by Motorola Solutions - to NewNet Communication Technologies for an undisclosed figure.

If the deal goes ahead NewNet will acquire the complete WiMAX product portfolio, the related employees and assets and active customer and supplier contracts. Approximately 300 Nokia Siemens Networks' employees will transfer to NewNet. Most of these are based in Chicago and Hangzhou, China. The companies expect to close the deal before December 31 2011.

Nokia Siemens announced plans to acquire Motorola Solutions wireless infrastructure business in July 2010 for $US12b in cash and consummated the deal only in May this year. In addition to the WiMAX business Nokia Siemens acquired products and services for GSM, CDMA, WCDMA and LTE technologies.

However it stressed the importance of the WiMAX products at the time describing the company as "a market leader in WiMAX, with 41 contracts in 21 countries; has a strong global footprint in CDMA with 30 active networks in 22 countries; and a robust GSM installed base, with more than 80 active networks in 66 countries; and excellent traction with LTE early adopters."

The announcement follows the sale of Nokia Siemens microwave backhaul business to DragonWave of Canada, announced early in November and the announcement last week by Nokia Siemens that it will sack a quarter of its workforce and focus solely on end-to-end network infrastructure for mobile broadband services.

NewNet is a 20 year old company with a diverse portfolio of telco products that, it says, includes "Mercury, the industry's most complete purpose-built, mobile multimedia content delivery platform; TraxcomSecure electronic transaction processing solutions, which deliver services such as mobile payments, e-banking, and e-commerce; the Total Control PDSN platform, which provides economic delivery of premium mobile data services in CDMA networks'¦[and] SS7, the world's first standards-based signalling platform, and a short message service centre (SMSC), which has been deployed in more than 200 wireless networks worldwide."

So far as iTWire can ascertain, the company has no presence in Australia. It is headquartered in Connecticut and lists offices in Chicago, India and Romania.

NewNet is owned by Skyview Capital, a private investment firm headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, which claims to specialise in the acquisition and management of 'systems critical' businesses in the areas of technology, telecommunications, business services, and niche manufacturing.