Today, Motorola announced that they sold their wireless network unit to Nokia Siemens for a price of $2.2 billion. The purchase brings in about 50 new customers for Nokia and that adds them to customers like China Mobile, Vodafone, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Clearwire.
More than 7500 employees will join the Nokia Siemens Networks once the deal is finalized. There will be some regulatory approvals needed for the deal to close and with those the deal will be all set by the end of this year. Motorola is one of the few companies that produces the handsets and network infrastructure for mobile customers. Many of the other mobile network companies have already split those operations up.
Motorola isn’t out of the mobile business just yet, they plan to keep the mobile phone unit, called Motorola Mobility, and their home networking business that makes set-up boxes. They are also hanging onto their wireless patent portfolio and its IDEN trunked wireless system, which Sprint uses, among others.
Some of the other companies to split up operations in the mobile business include Ericsson which formed a partnership with Sony, Alcatel sold the handset operations part of their business and Siemens got out of both businesses by selling them to Nokia.
