Thaindian News

By Gurmukh Singh
Toronto, July 25 (IANS) The liquidation of Canada’s fabled Nortel began Friday.

After a troubled decade, the 127-year-old telecom equipment giant went under the hammer in New York to sell its wireless business to the highest bidder. Its other divisions - the enterprise unit and the metro Ethernet networks unit - are also lined up for sale.

Nokia Siemens Networks with an initial offer of $650 million, American private equity firm MatlinPatterson with $725 million and Sweden’s Ericsson with $730 million were in the fray Friday to grab Nortel’s next-generation wireless technology.

The highest bidder will be known only next week after all the bids are reviewed by Nortel and its creditors.

Despite its offer of $1.1 billion, Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry, was shut out of the bidding process by Nortel after refusing to sign non-disclosure agreements.

An angry BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie had even appealed to the Canadian government to stop Nortel from selling its crucial next-generation wireless technology - known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) - to foreign players. LTE will allow carriers to offer cell phones with advanced features such as online gaming and video streaming.

But analysts here suspected that the BlackBerry maker was interested only in having a peek at the crucial technology.

Nortel, which once employed 90,000 people worldwide, has been operating under bankruptcy protection since January after posting losses of $5 billion last year.

A further loss of $507 million in the first quarter of this year sank it deeper.

The telecom giant’s accumulated problems - from the bubble burst to internal accounting scandal to the current meltdown - forced it to seek bankruptcy protection in the US and Canada this January - just ahead of its $107 million interest payment.