Nokia sells its stake in TD tech, a company founded with Huawei
|TD Tech is a Chinese-based company founded jointly by Nokia and Huawei in Beijing in 2005. The company has R&D centres with highly educated employees that study wireless communication technologies and make various products for carriers such as China Mobile where their products and solutions dominate its 3G and 4G commercial networks, commanding over 60% market share. Then the company also started pawing the road to private network business back in 2011 which is something Nokia is highly dedicated to nowadays.
Nokia held 51% of the shares while Huawei has the rest of it. Interestingly, the company started selling 5G products to its industrial users back in 2019, although we know that Huawei experienced some difficulties regarding the China-US sanctions war. Another intriguing fact is that TD Tech had a great deal of business in Huawei’s smartphone business, and the company announced phones like M40, P50, and Mate 50, which are actually Huawei smartphones. There has even been a rumour that TD Tech will be making phones under their own brand, but Nokia was against it since that kind of business put the company in legal jeopardy, considering how loosely the act breaking of US sanctions is defined. That phone was supposed to be TD Tech N8 Pro, a copy of Huawei Nova 8 Pro.
Anyways, TD Tech announced that Nokia is selling 51% of its shares and the buyer is the Chinese company New Oriental Advanced Materials. The price is believed to be set at around 308 million USD. According to the official statement, Huawei agrees with Nokia’s sales of equity but is not that happy with the new owner since New Oriental Advanced Materials does not possess the same strategic capabilities. Huawei does not have any willingness or possibility to jointly operate TD TECH and will be assessing its position in the company and could be exercising the right of first refusal, selling all shares and withdrawing, and possibly terminating the relevant technology authorization to TD TECH and its subsidiaries.
Anyways, Nokia changed its strategy and it seems to me that Nokia is even further distancing itself from any kind of smartphone business or development of commercially available products.
Source Huawei Central