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Aug. 20, 2009

Once more, Nokia Siemens Networks has reaffirmed its strong commitment to further expand its presence in the North American market.

In a press release issued late yesterday, Nokia Siemens CEO Simon Beresford-Wylie has appointed Sue Spradley as head of its North American operations. In addition, she will be joining the company’s executive board.

Recently, Nokia Siemens suffered an important setback in its North American efforts when it lost out on a bid to acquire Nortel’s CDMA and LTE technology assets.

Though Nokia Siemens made the initial bid of $650 million for the assets as part of Nortel’s bankruptcy proceedings, Ericsson ended up winning the final auction for the technology at a price of $1.13 billion.

Beresford-Wylie added that the company’s commitment to expand its presence in North America “is as strong as ever.”

Nokia Siemens Networks also announced that it would establish a “center of competence” in Dallas, Texas, devoted to the R&D of modern LTE technology.

Nortel's agreement to sell some of its assets to Ericsson included important CDMA contracts with several North American operators, including Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Bell Canada.

Valuable patents and intellectual property around LTE technology were also part of the acquisition.

It has not been disclosed how much Nokia Siemens was willing to pay for the patents. In early July, Research In Motion said it had entered into a "handshake agreement" to acquire parts of the assets for $1.1 billion.

In other news, on July 17, handset maker Nokia said its profit fell about 66.2 percent in its second quarter, as the current global recession continued to slow down sales and squeeze profit margins.

Nokia's profit actually dropped to €380 million, or 10 European cents per share, from €1.10 billion, or 29 cents per share for the comparable 2008 period.

Sales dropped to €9.91 billion from €13.15 for the same 2008 period. But nevertheless, Nokia still beat analysts' earnings estimates by about one cent per share and managed to increase its global market share from last quarter.

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Its portion of the global handset market now stands at about 38 percent, and the company managed to expand its smartphone market share to an estimated 41 percent.

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Source: Nokia Siemens Networks.