Hacker News Reader

Comment by VonGuard | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of when the Bush administration gave the contract for building a cell network in Iraq to Worldcom. And Worldcom went bankrupt. Clearly, they were not in the right position to fullfill the contract, but they were in the right position to bribe their way into the contract.

View on HN

This isn't the part of Nokia you're thinking of, which made handsets. That business was sold to Microsoft in a very dubious deal, and Microsoft promptly ran it into the ground.

Nokia is one of the three main players in the cell phone infrastructure market. The others are Ericsson and Huawei. There are a couple of smaller players too like Samsung and ZTE.

Nokia seems like a very reasonable choice for this contract. The Chinese players were presumably out for (mostly) political reasons. So this was probably a 2 way race with Ericsson.

edited: fix typo.

Nokia have an unrivalled technology and product platform, they’ve shipped millions of 4G/LTE base stations over the past decade. What makes you say they are not in a position to fulfil the contract?

Presumably they’ll get a lift to the moon from NASA

Nokia is a highly profitable company. I’m not seeing the comparison.

Their loss making division was the phones division which was sold off a while ago.

Well, I wouldn't say highly profitable. Unless I am reading incorrectly they haven't been making much of profit lately. Maybe the good parts make a hefty profit but alas, as a whole it has been a pretty sad sight to see.

The top management is out, we'll see next year how it changes the books.

In fairness to the Bush administration (not words I often use), WorldCom went bankrupt due to a massive accounting fraud that was probably largely unrelated to their technical capability to fulfill the contract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com