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Huawei to Open Research Center in Finland

December 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

PARIS — Huawei Technologies, a Chinese maker of telecommunications equipment, said on Monday that it planned to open a research and development center in Helsinki next year, accelerating its investments in Europe, where its business is expanding rapidly.

The move illustrates a trans-Atlantic difference in attitudes toward Huawei. The company has been largely shut out of the United States market for network gear because of Congressional concerns about possible security threats — fears the company insists are unfounded.

While Huawei has faced difficulties in some European markets, like France, it has done better elsewhere. Huawei employs more than 7,000 people in the region, and it says that total could double in the next three to five years. Huawei already has a research center in Italy and is studying the possibility of opening one in Spain. It also recently announced a $2 billion investment in Britain.

The planned center in Helsinki, involving an investment of 70 million euros, or about $90 million, will work on smartphone development, including features like user interfaces and power management, the company said. When the center opens next year, it will employ 30 people, but this could grow to 100 over the next five years, the company said.

The announcement is a plus for the Finnish technology industry, which has been suffering from the woes at Nokia. The company was once the world’s biggest cellphone maker, but its market share has fallen sharply in recent years.

“The open and innovative environment in Finland,” Huawei said, “is an ideal place for Huawei to strengthen our global R. D. capabilities for devices, creating opportunities for both Huawei and the Finnish telecommunications industry.”

Huawei has been known mostly for its network equipment, but the company is pushing to make a name for itself with its handsets.

Mobile devices accounted for 22 percent of its revenue last year, an increase of 37 percent. That compares with growth of 12 percent for the overall business.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/technology/huawei-to-open-research-center-in-finland.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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DealBook: In Battle for Patents, Google Buys a Batch From I.B.M.

July 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.Tony Avelar/Bloomberg NewsGoogle’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

In the heated battle for technology patents, Google is using its checkbook to bulk up.

The technology giant bought more than a thousand patents from I.B.M. this month, for a broad range of applications. In an e-mailed statement, Google confirmed the purchase: “Like many tech companies, at times we’ll acquire patents that are relevant to our business needs. Bad software patent litigation is a wasteful war that no one will win.”

The purchase was earlier reported by SEO by the Sea blog.

The deal comes less than one month after Google failed to win a cache of more than 6,000 patents from telecommunications equipment maker Nortel Networks. The company lost out to a consortium of competitors that included Apple and Microsoft, which paid $4.5 billion in cash for the lot — well above Google’s initial bid of $900 million. Google pursuit of patents is largely seen as a defensive maneuver, to deter lawsuits from rivals.

In a blog post in April, Google’s general counsel, Kent Walker, wrote, “a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services. Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=134d00a804c585396e7ea40c75a18b05

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Nokia and Ericsson Announce Cost Cutting

July 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

BERLIN — The two largest European makers of telecommunications equipment, Nokia and Ericsson, announced plans on Thursday to continue or accelerate cost-cutting efforts in the face of rising competition, internal reorganizations and weak demand in North America.

Nokia, the largest seller by volume of mobile phones, said it planned to cut more than the €1 billion, or $1.43 billion, it had previously planned to trim from its operating expenses by 2013. The company, based in Espoo, Finland, did not specify a new target. It announced the new plan as it reported loss of €368 million in the second quarter.

Ericsson, the largest maker of telecom networking equipment, said it took a restructuring charge of 1.3 billion Swedish kronor, or $202 million, in the quarter, more than some investors had been expecting, to pay for layoffs in Sweden.

The separate announcements sparked heavy trading in shares of both companies in Europe.

Ericsson’s shares fell more than 10 percent, even though the company, based in Stockholm, reported a 60 percent increase in profit and 14 percent rise in sales.

Nokia’s shares rose more than 5 percent as investors welcomed the handset maker’s intention to increase its austerity measures. Nokia said its sales fell 7 percent in the three months through June to €9.275 billion from €10.0 billion a year earlier.

Pete Cunningham, an analyst in Reading, England at Canalys, a research firm, said Nokia’s sales decline stemmed from its difficulty selling smartphones in China that use its Symbian operating system. Nokia in February said it planned to progressively replace Symbian with Microsoft’s Windows Phone software starting later this year.

“This is obviously not good news from Nokia,” Mr. Cunningham said. “I think the appetite for Symbian devices has fallen away very quickly since Nokia made the announcement about moving to Microsoft in February. This shows they definitely need those Windows phones as soon as possible.”

Stephen Elop, the Nokia chief executive hired from Microsoft last year, said Nokia had replaced key sales executives, reduced inventories in China, revamped its handset-pricing strategy and refocused its retail marketing programs to compensate for the downturn.

“The challenges we are facing during our strategic transformation manifested in a greater than expected way in Q2 2011,” Mr. Elop said in a statement. “However, even within the quarter, I believe our actions to mitigate the impact of these challenges have started to have a positive impact on the underlying health of our business.”

Mr. Elop, during a conference call with analysts, reiterated that Nokia planned to sequentially introduce the first Microsoft devices later this year in various national markets. He did not say how many devices Nokia would introduce, or in which markets.

Nokia’s sales fell in all regions of the world except the Middle East and Africa during the quarter. The greatest percentage decline was in North America, where sales fell 61 percent to €88 million from €223 million a year earlier.

Ericsson shares fell sharply even as the company, which faces competition from the Chinese competitors Huawei, ZTE and the French rival Alcatel-Lucent, reported a 59 percent increase in second-quarter profit to 3.2 billion kronor from 2 billion kronor a year earlier.

Sales at Ericsson rose 14 percent to 54.8 billion kronor from 48.0 billion.

During an interview, Hans Vestberg, the Ericsson chief executive, said the company’s restructuring charge in the second quarter had been greater than expected but was part of the ongoing adjustment of its global business to meet the economic conditions.

“If you look at our numbers today, this is one of the strongest quarters of growth we’ve ever had,” Mr. Vestberg said. “We had a higher restructuring cost than expected but we did that to improve the profitability of the company going forward.”

Mr. Vestberg said demand for mobile networking equipment remained strong globally during the quarter, especially in Russia, China, Brazil and India. Sales rose by 70 percent in Russia, 96 percent in China, 17 percent in Brazil and 107 percent in India, as operators built high-speed mobile broadband networks for growing populations.

Sales of networking equipment in North America fell 6 percent in the quarter, which Mr. Vestberg attributed to the appreciation of the Swedish currency against the dollar. Mr. Vestberg said Ericsson planned to report about $300 million in restructuring charges this year.

With the announcement on Thursday, the company was two-thirds of the way toward its goal, he said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=4f7a38abaef36e6db4c71d85f85ee7fe

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DealBook: Apple and Microsoft Beat Google for Nortel Patents

July 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Nortel Networks, the defunct Canadian telecommunications equipment maker, said that it had agreed to sell more than 6,000 patent assets to a consortium made up of Apple, Microsoft and other technology giants for $4.5 billion in cash.

The group of companies — which also included Research in Motion, Sony, Ericsson and EMC — beat out Google and Intel for the patents and patent applications that Nortel had accumulated when it was still one of the largest telecom equipment makers in North America.

Two years after it filed for bankruptcy, Nortel sold off its last remaining patents — covering businesses from wireless and networking technology to semiconductors — in an auction that it called ‘‘very robust’’ in a statement late Thursday.

‘‘The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world,’’ said George Riedel, chief strategy officer of Nortel.

Nortel had delayed the auction once last month because of what it called ‘‘significant interest,’’ and only started the sale on Monday. The company said it hoped to close the transaction in the third quarter.

In April, Google made a stalking-horse bid of $900 million for the patents, some of which are related to the 4G wireless technology known as long-term evolution. Networks based on that technology, considered crucial to the future of telecommunications, are created to carry large amounts of data like streamed video to mobile devices.

The Google offer was interpreted as a defensive move by the search engine giant, which was seeking intellectual property rights to shield itself from lawsuits as it moves deeper into the mobile business with its Android platform.

Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote at the time of the bid that it was supposed to ‘‘create a disincentive for others to sue Google.’’

‘‘The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents,’’ Mr. Walker wrote.

Now, thousands of crucial patents will be in the hands of rivals like Apple and Microsoft, both of which have shown themselves to be much more aggressive in patent litigation than Google.

On Friday, Mr. Walker said in an e-mail message that the auction’s outcome was ‘‘disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition.”

The sale announced Thursday will require approval from courts in Canada and the United States, Nortel said. Some 2,600 of the patent assets are American. A joint hearing has been scheduled for July 11.

Nortel, based in Mississauga, Ontario, was once a flagship Canadian company, before a nearly $6 billion loss in the crisis year of 2008 pushed it toward bankruptcy, for which it filed in 2009.

Since then, it has also sold its wireless equipment business for $1.13 billion to Ericsson, the Swedish company that walked away with $340 million worth of patents from the auction Thursday. More recently, Ericsson bought Telcordia, the American telecom network equipment maker, for $1.15 billion.

In 2009, Nortel sold another unit dealing with enterprise solutions for $475 million to Avaya, the former ATT unit now owned by private equity, which filed for an initial public offering last month.

RIM, Canada’s most prominent technology company since Nortel collapsed, said in a separate statement that it had paid about $770 million for patents at the auction.

The sale of patents Thursday raised more than the rest of Nortel’s disposals combined.

But the company said that it did not anticipate that holders of its common shares or preferred stock would benefit from the bankruptcy process. Creditor protection proceedings ‘‘will result in the cancellation of these equity interests,’’ Nortel said.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ead8a476a370679df262e06bd1909a28

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