Nokia Siemens Networks: Nokia and Siemens collaborate

Nokia and Siemens to merge their phone equipment units

Mobile phone maker Nokia and German tech giants Siemens have said in a statement that they are combining their phone equipment units to form a common entity.

This joint venture would save the two companies around 1.5 billion euros ($1.90 billion) by 2010. The new venture between these two companies would be called Nokia Siemens Networks and would combine the Nokia’s Networks unit and Siemens’ carrier-related operations.

This unit had a combined 2005 pro forma revenues of 15.8 billion euros and has a worker base of around 60,000 employees. It would be headquartered in Nokia’s home country of Finland and would be owned on a 50-50 basis by both Nokia and Siemens.

This comes after two networking giants Alcatel and Lucent agreed sometime back to form a similar venture to compete against Asian rivals like Huawei.