Toronto-based Nortel, whose stock has lost 96% of its value last year, announced in September that it would sell its metro Ethernet business, an Internet-focused piece of the company that generates about $1.5 billion a year in revenue.
The most interested potential acquirer of that division of Nortel may be Huawei, which bid $400 million for Nortel’s offering in September, according to Avian Securities–a generous offer considering that the company’s current market capitalization, hammered by debt and missed earnings projections, languishes at less than half that value.
[…]
A January 2007 report for the U.S. Air Force written by the RAND research group highlighted the military background of Huawei chief executive Ren Zhengfei: Before he founded Huawei in 1988, Ren was an engineering director for the Chinese military’s telecom research department. Today, “Huawei maintains deep ties with the Chinese military, which serves a multifaceted role as an important customer, as well as Huawei’s political patron and research and development partner,” according to the report.
A month later, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation issued its own report, citing Huawei as a security threat and arguing that “if a PLA protégé firm acquired an American firm that provided computer network equipment, software and services to the U.S. government, the possibilities for cyber-espionage would be virtually unlimited.”
h/t Brian M.
On US security equipment, there are very stringent …. Mmmppphhhh, legggo-oh,, mmmppphh,..uuughgag!
Chinese, spying? I’ll remember to be careful next time I talk on my da ge da. (big brother device)
Sidewinder….
If they get it,does this mean they will stop sending us tainted stuff??
oatmeal dude nailed it .
I can’t believe the US DOD would let this go. Hell, they can just buy two less bunker-buster bombs and use that same money to purchase Nortel.
Nortel…one of canadas most sought after places to work…wow, how the mighty have fallen, what happened? Im sure there is a book out there.
Heck, we want them to use Nortel equipment, that way we know their espionage activities will be breaking down all the time. The Nortel stuff will probably overload their power generators and short-circuit their networks.. They won’t know what hit ’em. We should be sending it to them.
Truly a symbol of how crappy Canada is at high-tech development and commercialization over the long-haul.
Nortel was created by bundling Bell’s technological crown-jewels and setting them free -and now they have turned to dust. Blackberry did the same with a big part of the U of W talent pool and, if the new Storm is any indication, BB will soon be the atari of smartphone makers.
Recommended reading:
why mexicans don’t drink molson
http://www.andreamandelcampbell.com/book.htm
The downfall of BB could very well be the APPLE I PHONE,Ive had an extended demo, very impressive.
your blaking my balz hans nortel. your blaking my balz
What I done did?
pacemaker:
I have owned a iPhone since early august. It is the best two hundred dollars i have ever spent (with possible exception of that hooker in montreal in ’86. I digress) It or an iteration of it will be the base platform for all new tech going forward. Its practically infinitely flexible interface (no physical qwerty keyboard to limit it) means that countless applications are and will be written for it from games to feeding your fish while you are not home to starting your car on a cold morning.
My first encounter with the bb storm left me shocked at how badly concieved it was and how poorly it worked. Two years since the first iPhone designs leaked out and this was as good as bb could do n response? I have several business associates who were bb devotees of the highest rank. Not anymore.
Huawei (I’m pretty sure it is Huawei) opened a Design Centre in Ottawa a while ago and by now it has probably acquired much of Nortel’s biggest ethernet business assets – it’s engineers.
RIM did the same thing by opening a Design Centre outside of Chicago. Motorola is going down the tubes and is shedding engineers left and right and talk has it that they will move all handheld device development to google’s android (and ditch all the other mobile OS development efforts) which means that a couple thousand more Motorola engineers will be fired. When Motorola saw RIM coming to town it worked out a deal so that RIM would not actively recruit Motorola engineers still working at Motorola. Motorola has now sued RIM over this.
The point is is that more and more high tech companies realize that it is the talent that is important. Fixed assets and patents, etc., are not that important because talent can invent new stuff if they’re managed properly.
Huawei is still pretty murky stuff because no one really knows how or where money flows from in China. I’ve also read that the US watches out for Israeli companies as well because most of their high tech is spawned by their military complex and Israelis have been caught stealing US deemed secrets on several occasions.