Nokia’s wireless modem business sold to Renesas for $200 million

Florin  By on 06 Jul 10

Usually, Nokia buys businesses, but today the company announced the opposite: it’s selling its wireless modem business to Renesas Electronics, a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer formed in April this year after the merger of Renesas Technology and NEC Electronics.

The deal is part of an alliance between Nokia and Renesas – they’re “forming a strategic business alliance to develop modem technologies for HSPA+/LTE (Evolved High-Speed Packet Access / Long-Term Evolution) and its evolution.”

Subject to regulatory approvals, the acquisition of Nokia’s wireless modem business by Renesas should be completed in Q4 2010 and it will cost the Japanese company about $200 million. 1,100 Nokia R&D professionals (from Finland, India, the UK and Denmark) will be transferred to Renesas, as well as certain Nokia patents related to LTE, HSPA and GSM standards.

According to Nokia’s Kai Oistamo, the alliance with Renesas enables the company “to continue to focus on its own core businesses, connecting people to what matters to them with our mobile products and solutions.”

Since it’s selling an important part of its hardware business, Nokia will probably want to concentrate more on the software side. And it really should, since Symbian is slowly falling into disgrace, at least when it comes to high-end devices – hopefully, MeeGo will be a platform that can better fight with iPhone OS and Android.

Via Press release

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