The takeover of the French-American colossus has been completed in proportion of 80 per cent, but will eventually surpass 95 per cent, for a sum that analysts consider significant.
The new IT giant will be called the Nokia Corporation. At global level, the Group will have over 110,000 employees, around 1,500 of them in Romania (Timisoara and Bucharest).
Nokia’s takeover of Alcatel is the biggest telecom gear industry transaction since 1999 when Alcatel bought Ascend Communications for USD 21 M, Bloomberg informs. By taking over Alcatel, Nokia will gain an edge over competitors Ericsson and Huawei on the wireless networking equipment market, according to IDC research company.
Nokia had a market share of 15.8 per cent on the global wireless networking market at the end of 2014, ranking behind market leader Ericsson (25.7 per cent market share) and Huawei (23.2 per cent market share), according to IDC. Alcatel had a market share of 11.4 per cent at the end of 2014. By closing the deal, the Finnish company secures its expansion in China, on a market of 1.3 billion wireless services subscribers, as well as the takeover of contracts with two of the largest mobile phone operators in the United States – Verizon and AT&T.
As a location of the former Alcatel-Lucent, Romania is present mainly in domains such as mobile technologies (LTE), with approximately 40 per cent of the employees, a domain in which Alcatel-Lucent was competing directly with Nokia’s main line of activity.
According to the IT union in Timisoara, the location in Romania remains fairly competitive from a financial standpoint, from the point of view of labour costs but especially that of the employees’ capabilities, most of them having significant experience in the telecommunications domain. Thus, there are premises for the emergence of new opportunities both for existing employees and for the hiking of the number of jobs on certain lines of activity if Nokia decides to transfer other activities to Romania too. In these moments, it is extremely important for the site in Romania to enjoy intense promotion both on the part of the local management but also on the part of local authorities.
Nokia thus returns to Romania four years after it hastily vacated its plant in Jucu, close to Cluj, in order to open a similar one in Vietnam. Back then, it was said that the reason for the relocation had to do with poor infrastructure, the slump in phone sales at global level and the hiking of salaries. Over 2,000 employees were laid off as a result and Romania lost its second largest exporter.
Alcatel’s new owners however will no longer handle the manufacturing of cheap mobile phones, but will instead benefit from French expertise in domains such as research and development in latest 4G technologies, the development of cloud or big-data solutions or the management of mobile communication networks for operators abroad. (source: nineoclock.ro)
