Contact: Brian Partridge
Nokia has acquired Alcatel-Lucent for $16.5bn. The deal brings together former rivals and changes the competitive landscape for the next generation of converged broadband telecom infrastructure. We also think it could incite a new wave of dealmaking among telecom infrastructure suppliers, most notably Ericsson.
The all-stock transaction, expected to close in the first half of next year, will create a combined company with top or near-top market share in several categories, including LTE, fixed broadband infrastructure, IP routing, subscriber data management and customer experience management. Both companies have aggressively pursued SDN/NFV competencies, with Alcatel-Lucent strong in SDN and Nokia being a leader in early implementations of NFV.
Traditional fixed and mobile voice telephony services have steadily declined. Demand for fixed and mobile broadband Internet services has helped fill the gap, but massive network traffic increases have driven incremental revenue growth for operators. These market dynamics have created an environment where bundled fixed voice, broadband and video ‘triple play’ and mobile ‘quad play’ services are imperative to maintain operator profitability and customer stickiness – but they require architectural convergence (to IP networks) to efficiently support them. Against this industry backdrop, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent bring several complementary assets to the table that will position the new company well to serve traditional customers (telcos) as well as create some new opportunities to sell to large enterprises and Internet vendors.
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