Nokia is to buy Alcatel-Lucent in an all-share deal that values its smaller French rival at 15.6 billion euros ($16.6 billion), building up its telecom equipment business to compete with market leader Ericsson.
With sales of around 26 billion euros, the combined company will rank a strong second in mobile equipment, with global market share of 35 percent, behind Ericsson at 40 percent and ahead of Huawei’s 20 percent, according to Bernstein Research.
Today the two companies employ 113,000 people. The total includes 40,000 researchers including the former Bell Labs which Nokia pledged to “re-energize.” Its combined R&D budget of nearly $5 billion is on par with that of Cisco Systems and ahead of Ericsson but slightly behind Huawei.
The new Nokia will have stronger exposure to the important North American market, with major AT&T and Verizon contracts.
It will also fill gaps in its product portfolio with Alcatel-Lucent’s technology in optical transmission and Internet routers, which help telecom operators handle the ever-increasing volume of data brought on by users surfing the web on their smartphones and watching Netflix at home.
Nokia will give Alcatel-Lucent shareholders 0.55 shares in the combined company for each of their old shares, putting 33.5 percent of the entity in Alcatel shareholders’ hands if the tender offer is fully taken up.
The deal will be finalised in the first half of 2016.