Espoo sandwich

Industry observers and are still digesting the Espoo sandwich that was Nokia's Q1 results, which had us speculating in this week's Friday Review about the future of its infrastructure business, Nokia Siemens Networks.

It was interesting to note during my research the number of other players that were once all-singing, all-dancing network equipment providers and device makers that subsequently sliced, diced, and spun-off various parts of their business.

Before becoming Alcatel-Lucent in 2006, Alcatel had a handset division that it spun off into a joint venture with Hong Kong's TCL Communication in 2004.

NSN's joint venture partner, Munich-based Siemens, sold its phone arm to its partner BenQ in 2005.

More recently, Motorola split into two distinct units, Motorola Mobility for the handset business and Motorola Solutions for the networks and TV business. It sold its wireless network arm to Nokia Siemens in July 2010 for $1.2 billion.

Bringing things bang up to date we have Ericsson, which of course completed the sale of its half of Sony Ericsson to Sony earlier this year.

I'm sure there are plenty more examples out there; the question is, will we see Nokia put more distance between its loss-making handset business and its loss-making networks business?