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Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic 54

Posted by timothy from the genune-panaphonics-bearer-bills dept.
jones_supa (887896) writes "Nokia's future as a company focused on providing network solutions, rather than mobile phones, looks to be bright. The company made big profits in the second quarter of 2014 after selling its mobile devices unit — the cornerstone of Nokia's rise in the 1990s — to Microsoft. Meanwhile Nokia has been buying up other businesses such as the Chicago-based SAC Wireless. Now Nokia is acquiring part of Panasonic's network business in an effort to boost its presence in Japan. The deal announced Thursday will give the Finnish firm control of roughly one third of Japan's mobile network market."
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Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic More

Nokia Buys a Chunk of Panasonic

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  • SAC wireless? (Score:3)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Thursday July 31, 2014 @09:49AM (#47573923)

    How good is the cellphone reception in a Minuteman silo?

  • Smart Grid Networks (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Panasonic plays in all kinds of networks, including Smart Grid. Smart grid networks are projected to grow tremendously in the next decade. Perhaps this is a move to get a piece of it.

    Many smart meters are already cellular, and I know there are all kinds of network types for smart grid, including cellular, drive-by wireless, mesh networks, zigbee, wifi, and PLC.

    Owning a piece of Panasonic gives Nokia turnkey exposure to all of these markets.

  • I thought that Nokia was a Japanese company. Maybe with the Japanese electronics boom of the eighties they were happy to let that misconception persist.

    • From Finland (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Thursday July 31, 2014 @10:10AM (#47574075)

      I thought that Nokia was a Japanese company.

      No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that. They are a Finnish company and that fact is well known worldwide. I can see how one might think they were Asian though since so much electronics comes from that part of the world. But Nokia got quite a lot of press regarding where they were from.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Nice troll.

        Nokia is indeed a Japanese company. The submitter AND the editor are confusing Nokia with Ericsson, which IS a Finnish company.

      • He thought that because the limited japanese phonetic system (46 sounds more or less iirc) allows for that name and it doesn't sound particularly european.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )
          Pretty much. And honestly, Europe wasn't exactly known for their consumer electronics during my formative years either, excepting extremely high-end brands like Bang and Olufsen.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by aliquis ( 678370 )

            Philips.
            Grundig.
            Telefunken.
            Leica.
            Ericsson.
            Loewe.
            Siemens.
            Sennheiser.
            Arion.
            Arm.
            EMI.
            KEF.
            Thorn.

            Guess Zeiss doesn't cut it but you sure as hell has heard the name =P

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by TWX ( 665546 )
              How about I rephrase... Europe wasn't known for their consumer electronics in the United States. Of that list, the only one that I was aware of in the eighties through mid-nineties was Philips, and I knew them mostly through their ownership of American firm Magnavox. I'm now acquainted with Siemens, Ericcson, and Loewe, and I've heard of a couple of the others, but they weren't the names of that time like Samsung (for low end), Sony (for medium-grade) and Pioneer (for higher-end) were.

              • Philips was kind of like Sony here until they basically sold most of their consumer electronics divisions. Plus the record companies.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by aliquis ( 678370 )

                I guess not all of them is all that well-known.

                But also US is a country where more of their goods is sold inside the country / their own market than what is the case over in Europe.

                Here in Sweden for instance exports is a big thing, and trade with the EU, US and of course Asia too.

                Imho Philips make shit products now.
                Siemens: Revenue Decrease â80.30 billion (2013)[1]
                Sony: Revenue Increase US$75.410 billion (2014)[2]
                Bosch: Revenue Increase â53.9 billion (2013)
                Philips: Revenue â24.78

            • Logitech is a Swiss company. :)

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by aliquis ( 678370 )

                Roccat is German.
                SteelSeries is Danish.
                Qpad is Swedish.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by aliquis ( 678370 )

                BeyerDynamic of course is German.

                Damn a lot of German brands and equipment in these lifts. I don't really know what the others may be (partly because I live in Sweden and Germany is closer I guess but also because it's the #1 economy of EU and fourth in the world (after US, China and Japan.)

      • They are a Finnish company and that fact is well known worldwide.

        Most people knew them for their snow tires before their cell phones. He must not live in the snow belt. I'm glad they separated the two businesses - I still buy Nokian snow tires and I sure as hell don't want Microsoft involved in my winter traction!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )
          Correct. Don't have to shovel sunshine...

        • I didn't even know there were Nokian snow tires until I worked for Nokia and read their history. Even then I thought they were a European-only brand for awhile.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjbe ( 173966 )

          Most people knew them for their snow tires before their cell phones.

          Not in the US they didn't. Virtually nobody in the US knew of Nokia the company before they became the big name in cell phone hand sets.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by GNious ( 953874 )

            Wooooo ... 5% of the world didn't know of Nokia until they became the largest cellphone manufacturer.

            (in fairness, since I don't use rubber-boots, or drive around in the snow, I didn't really know of Nokia until the 90'ies either)

            • Wooooo ... 5% of the world didn't know of Nokia until they became the largest cellphone manufacturer.

              Yeah, I'm sure they were a household name in India, China, Brazil and Russia too... [/sarcasm]

              Seriously, if more than 10% of the world's population (and I'm being generous) had ever heard of Nokia prior to them getting into cell phones I'd be shocked.

      • No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that.

        IIRC there was a joke in the first Michael Bay's Transforms movie along those lines.

        I think part of the reason is that it sounds kind of like Japanese and Finnish and Japanese are kind of in the same language group. Not saying there are kissing cousins like the romance languages, but as languages go they seem to be orphans which share a common great grandparent.

        • No insult intended (seriously) but you were pretty much the only one who thought that.

          IIRC there was a joke in the first Michael Bay's Transforms movie along those lines.

          I think part of the reason is that it sounds kind of like Japanese and Finnish and Japanese are kind of in the same language group. Not saying there are kissing cousins like the romance languages, but as languages go they seem to be orphans which share a common great grandparent.

          Sorry, but Finnish is part of the Uralic group and Finnic subdivision while Japanese is part of the Altaic language family and Japonic subdivision.

        • Not much similarity in the languages except for having a limited phoneme set. The most commonly known language that Finnish is related to is Hungarian. If there is a common parent to Japanese thousands of years ago it is so far back in time as to be irrelevant as to modern sounds.

          But stick some substitute in some Finnish vowels that have the accent marks and no one would have confused it with Japanese.

      • Don't laugh. For years I would see golfers (lots of these in AZ) going by with those huge Ping bags, and I always assumed it to be a Chinese company. I was amazed to find that it was not only American but local.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )
          "Ping" never got me, but I knew the word first from the film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October and its scottish pronounciation (even though he was playing a Soviet Lithuanian), and after that I new it from the ICMP utility. For me, if it had a language association it was scottish/English and technical, not Asian or Chinese in particular.

      • I wonder if this is a side-effect of the American pronunciation "No-kia" versus the European "Knock-ia"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )
          Probably. The "No" is pronounced strongly and staccato, and the "kia" part has most emphasis on the "ee" pronounciation of the letter i.

      • Actually, a LOT of people thought they were Japanese. I honestly don't know why that is. The syllables in the language are similar, but there's nothing really in the word "Nokia" that is familiarly Japanese.

        And then, once some people discover Nokia is actually Finnish they will start up with the Swedish accents...

  • Granted, Nokia sold their phone/mobile device business to Microsoft and before that, I thought they sold their network appliance business to Checkpoint which is a BSD based kernel if I remember correctly. Old, but still fairly solid.

    I honestly didn't know Nokia had anything left, so color me surprised with this.

    • Re:Nokia still has products? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ceriel Nosforit ( 682174 ) on Thursday July 31, 2014 @11:09AM (#47574441)

      They started out in 1904 making rubber. Today they provide large part of Finland's export, so around here they are considered 'too big to fail'.

      Importing a CEO from abroad was seen with great suspicion, which is why Elon made such a grand and public gesture of assimilating Finnish culture for a few months. - A venture about as daft as scheduling Tibet for two years to get enlightened.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by serbanp ( 139486 )

        Repeat slowly after me: Elop, Stephen Elop. Elon Musk is a different (way different!) person...

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by c ( 8461 )

        I hear the cultural assimilation process went pretty well until he tried the salmiakki. That experience turned out to be the impetus for the "burning oil platform" memo.

      • I think a CEO from abroad wasn't as big a concern as a CEO from Microsoft. They've had several foreigners high up in the executive staff and on their board for some time.

    • Nokia has completely shifted gears before - they used to make forestry equipment at one point (early 70s?), which indirectly led to their making VHF radios with telephone interfaces for use out in the boondocks, which led to cellphones for them.

      The VHF "portable phones" from the late 80s, by the way, can be hacked into becoming 2 meter (144 MHz) ham radios. Have fun...

    • Nokia had a lot of divisions, phones were just one of them. Nokia Networks however had previously merged with a Siemens division and became Nokia Siemens (not entirely sure if it's under the umbrella of Nokia as a subsidiary). There's also Nokia Research which I think is still a part of Nokia. Check Point was a partner with Nokia starting in 1998, but was never owned by Nokia. (I'm not sure what Nokia division that was)

  • Letting Samsong, and Apple sue each other; mean while m$ makes inroads for future litigations to a weakened industry?
  • Nokia is 7 years too late trying to be the company Ericsson remade itself into in the 2000. The key blunder was Nokia's backing WiMAX, a technology that was horribly marketed as potentially cutting out the major telecoms, whereas Ericsson helped create LTE with Verizon [ericssonhistory.com] by providing a solution for Verizon to upgrade from CDMA. It's surprising to me that the tech sites have not trumpeted perhaps history's greatest example of a company paying the price for failing to invest in the next generation of technolo

  • Just so long as they don't stop them from making 50" plasma TV's before it's time to upgrade my current set!

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