Even before the recession took hold, many entrepreneurs were fleeing from high-tech hardware–particularly markets facing many competitors. Not Vikram Mehta.
He is president and chief executive of Blade Network Technologies, a closely held Silicon Valley maker of networking gear that was formed from assets spun out of Nortel Networks in 2006.
Here is a good rule of thumb in M&A: Be careful what you say in public.
The joint venture Nokia Siemens appears to be learning this lesson the hard way this week, after its North American Operations president, Sue Spradley, was quoted as saying it would be interested in buying “other” assets of Toronto telecommunications-gear maker Nortel Networks, which filed for bankruptcy-law protection in January.
Nokia Siemens Networks negotiated a shrewd $650 million agreement to buy the crown jewel of the bankrupt Nortel Networks–the shrinking, but highly profitable voice-only wireless technology called CDMA–together with an R&D group developing systems to upgrade carrier networks to ultra-broadband speeds.
Nortel Networks, the once multibillion dollar telecom vendor now trading as a micro cap, may be considering offers of as much as $1 billion for its product portfolio of gear that lets phone companies string Ethernet networking to homes and businesses.
Merrill Lynch telecom equipment analyst Vivek Arya cut his rating on Nortel today to Underperform from Neutral, and cut his price target to $7 from $8.50.
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