EoW March 2007

Transat lant ic Cable

Will General Motors chairman and chief executive Richard G Wagoner Jr and his US management team find food for thought in Opel’s resurgence? European analysts point to Carl-Peter Forster’s strong focus on better products – as opposed to the typical GM focus on financials. Christoph Stuermer, senior auto analyst with market researcher Global Insight, in Frankfurt, said: “[The lesson is], get the brand right and listen to the market.” Telecoms and utilities Redback Networks Inc (San Jose, California), which makes routers used to direct data over broadband networks, has agreed to be acquired by Swedish mobile phone equipment maker Ericsson for $2.1 billion in cash. Kevin DeNuccio, Redback’s chief executive officer, said the deal will allow both companies to capitalise on the need of Internet providers and telecom companies to revamp their networks to handle the massive bandwidth requirements of those services. Stockholm-based Ericsson is the world’s largest maker of mobile phone networks. ❈

The purchase was expected to be completed early in the year. Redback management will stay in place, and the company will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson. Nortel Networks said it has completed a deal to sell a portion of its mobile telephone network equipment business to Alcatel-Lucent for $320 million. On completion of the sale at the New Year, Nortel would no longer offer access products – the radios and other devices that link phones to a telephone system – for the network standard UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications service). This is a higher-speed version of GSM (global system for mobile communications), the wireless system in widest use worldwide. Some 1,700 employees will transfer from Nortel headquarters in Toronto, Canada, to Paris-based Alcatel- Lucent as part of the sale of the unit, which is unprofitable. Nortel will continue to offer some UMTS products used by telephone companies to move calls and wireless data around their networks.

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EuroWire – March 2007