This week a bidding war broke out for Nortel as Apple and LG defied the recession with bumper quarters.
Investment firm MaitlinPatterson saw NSN’s €422 million offer for Nortel’s wireless assets and raised a €510 million bid. The company, representing Nortel bondholders, said it aimed to keep the vendor in one piece.
But Nortel also signed away its enterprise division to Avaya for €334 million
Ericsson joined the fray, reportedly putting €513 million on the table for the wireless business.
LG’s best ever handset sales helped it to a €647 million profit.
Apple enjoyed yet another bumper quarter as iPhones and new computers flew out the door. The iPhone is still driving AT&T subscriber growth, but the subsidies are also cutting into profits.
Microsoft’s profit declined and revenue fell over the full fiscal year for the first time in its history.
Qualcomm raised its forecast on the back of expected stronger demand, but got whacked with a record fine in Korea for anti-competitive behavior.
Amazon bought Zappos, an online shoestore and potential rival, for €568 million.
By June 30, China Mobile had sold 959,000 TD-SCDMA services, well short of its full-year target of 10 million.
An employee at Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese manufacturer, killed himself after being accused over a missing iPhone prototype.
Chinese censors had to scrub the web clean of references to Nuctech, a company formerly headed by Hu Jintao’s son Hu Haifeng which is now embroiled in a scandal in Namibia.
China’s biggest cable TV operator won a broadband license. An advertising-funded UK MVNO threw in the towel.
Beverage firm San Miguel lined up a stake in collapsed Philippine operator Extelcom.
Huawei is in the running to win a key US contract.
A US federal agency scrapped a study into the impact of cellphones on driver safety and kept secret hundreds of pages of warnings about the dangers, a former official revealed.
Seacom, a 1.28Tbps cable along Africa’s eastern coast, went live – the first optical cable to connect the continent.
Analysts predicted a surge in demand for mobile broadband. Norwegian doctors praised the camphone after a woman used it to record a painful and rare disease in her breasts.
And a prankster visited Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg with a megaphone to complain about the carrier’s privacy policies.