NSN mulls changes to Moto deal

Nokia Siemens is looking to restructure its $1.2 billion (€859 million) acquisition of Motorola Solutions' networking business to make it acceptable to Chinese antitrust authorities.
 
Unnamed sources cited by Bloomberg say NSN wants to end the stalemate that is stopping the deal being closed, and could drop Motorola’s GSM assets to do so.
 
That would leave it with Motorola's CDMA and Wimax products, and its LTE platform and IPR. It should address competition concerns, since Motorola's installed base in China is nearly all centered on GSM (apart from its TD-LTE show network for China Mobile).
 
The Chinese probes and an outstanding lawsuit brought in the US by Huawei are the only obstacles to the acquisition, which has received approval from all other relevant competition authorities. The hurdles caused Nokia Siemens to indefinitely delay closing the deal, after conceding a second deadline of end 1Q11 was unlikely to be met.
 
Sources at the vendor said it is determined not to walk away from the plan, which would bring in Motorola's customers in the US, including Sprint and Verizon.
 
NSN was trumped by Ericsson in its bid for the larger US assets of Nortel last year, and also has to address the Huawei lawsuit, which seeks to block any transfer of the Chinese firm's IPR and trade secrets to NSN. Motorola gained these through a 3G reseller deal with Huawei, agreed when it virtually exited the W-CDMA sector in 2006.
 
Huawei has already secured an injunction against the transfer, though not a block on the whole merger. NSN has said it has no interest in the Huawei secrets, and could exclude that aspect of the Motorola business from the re-engineered deal too.
 

Original article: NSN could restructure Motorola deal to gain approval