Huawei muses on Nokia's future

Affordability

If they bide their time, the purchase of Nokia in a few years will be a snip at 99p.

Re: Just what Microsoft needs

A worldwide whispering campaign against the big chinese manufacturers leave Microsoft free to play the good guys and rescue Nokia.

How very convenient. If they get lucky state interference will keep the bidding low as well.

(With current MS management, there's no believable hint of planning for this specific route to owning Nokia though... the incompetent idiots just got lucky)

Re: Just what Nokia needs

"If Huawei wants Nokia, it's because Nokia has considerable assets"

The brand. Which would be really useful in cracking Europe, where the Huawei name is not widely considered when shopping for a phone), and in emerging markets (like India) where the Huawei name may be a turn off.

Seeing as the vast majority of handsets are made in China by contract manufacturers your fears are misplaced. Anyway the spooks want, and get, backdoors in the networks so they can listen in on everyone. The reason why the US is worried is that Huawei is probably not prepared to give them access to the backdoors in its equipment.

For a large Chinese company Huawei is reasonably well run with established centres of development outside of China. ZTE on the other hand is still largely controlled by the army.

"Not sure I trust Huawei to deliver my smartphone."

Having used their current crop, It's not a matter of trusting them because of their political connections, it's more because they're more than a little "rough around the edges".

Re: the tip of the iceberg

I assume you're referring to telco equipment (=Nokia Siemens Networks)?

I suspect NSN would never be part of the deal. Yes, Siemens is looking to cash in PDQ but I can't imagine competition authorities anywhere approving the acquisition of NSN by Huawei...

You're right in that it wouldn't be about smarthphones - it would be about patents.

Re: Apple will buy Nokia first...

Apple doesn't have much of a record for this kind of acquisition: buying a large company, stripping out the IP and selling or closing the rest. You don't need engineers for that but lots and lots of beancounters.

Other manufacturers would never let Apple go it alone. Much more likely for a joint bid, presumably led by Microsoft who we can assume to have already assured itself with preferential rights, with the IP going to a patent pool as happened with Nortel.

If we're lucky Microsoft will get in a bidding war with itself again like it did with Skype.