re: Siemens Comm Has M&A CallersI don't think Nortel or Ericsson is a good fit. The Siemens Com product line is mostly land-line equipment and Ericsson doesn't much experience with land-line in the U.S. Also, the Siemens Com product line appears to have a lot of overlap with Nortel, especially with softswitch and media gateways.
If you believe the rumor mill, everyone and their dog is interested in acquiring this group - from small company to large player. Seems to me that the product line is not that great anyway - have you ever heard of Siemens equipment really being deployed in a substaial U.S deployment? Nortel and Ericsson would be better served if they merged together than picking through this bone pile.
re: Siemens Comm Has M&A CallersLet me disagree with the Nortel/Siemens fit comment. In fact, though there is a great overlap between the two as far as the Carrier VoIP market is concerned,this is still a developing market, and it would be very valuable to both companies to take such a strong lead by combining their positions. In addition to that, the combination would be very interesting for the Enterprise space, where Siemens has a strong position in SMB / entry level voice eqpt but no data presence, and Nortel has data + mid/large Enterprise solutions.
And in the wireless space this would fit nicely as well, one is strong in CDMA, the other in GSM, both can build a position in UMTS and Wi-Max.
Geographically speaking, it also does seem to make sense. NA and Asia for NT, EMEA and Latin America for Siemens as assets in the deal.
re: Siemens Comm Has M&A Callersre: "Geographically speaking, it also does seem to make sense. NA and Asia for NT, EMEA and Latin America for Siemens as assets in the deal."
Yeah, that's where NT-Siemens seems to make the most sense. There are relatively few geographic areas where both are dominant and constantly beating up on each other.
re: Siemens Comm Has M&A CallersIt depends what the end definition of Siemens Comm really is. They have carved up the N.A. unit up into a seperate entity. Will they sell the whole biz as-is or will they carve it up into a bunch of pieces. Agree, the only traction Siemens has is in Latin America where a Nortel or Ericsson purchase may make sense. The DSL CPE biz has never generated a profit - not sure the enterprise biz is a growing biz.
re: Siemens Comm Has M&A CallersI thought Svanberg said he doesn't want to do a big acquisition. Siemens comm group would be pretty big don't ya think?
re: Siemens Comm Has M&A CallersI can't imagine anybody is going to jump all over acquiring a business that loses money. Siemens Comm also has an awful lot of workers in countries with labor laws that make it incredibly expensive to lay them off. That's not a good thing when anyone buying this business would immediately need to eject half the people in a restructuring.
re: Siemens Comm Has M&A CallersNot only that, but Ericsson just bought out another wireline maufacturer, Marconi. Do they really need this redundancy with Siemens ICN? Doubt it.
Ericsson or Nortel?
ph