Under the terms of the deal, Stockholm, Sweden-based Teleca will take on about 50 Ericsson employees based at Ericsson’s German operation in Nuremberg, where it will then continue developing systems for use in Ericsson mobile platforms. CEO Nick Stammers said: Through the outsourcing agreement we will establish our first office in the important German market and gain much coveted expertise within voice recognition. The company said the acquisition would be accretive to earnings in 2003, and would close in February, although terms were not disclosed.
This is the second move by Teleca to expand its market reach in the past week, and follows the decision to set up a subsidiary outfit in Korea with 15 employees, where it will provide systems integration services for mobile devices and consumer electronics, as well as act as a reseller of its mobile application AU Mobile Suite, which it claims has been implemented into over 100 handsets in the Korean market.
Ericsson itself has been keen to sell off its R&D operations to reduce its outstanding debts. Last October the company sold off its R&D operations in India to Wipro Technologies, which included transferring about 300 of Ericsson’s R&D employees based in India over to Wirpo where they will continue to work on operations and maintenance software for mobile networks, Tigris IP router products, as well as products for charging and e-commerce development.
The same month, Ericsson also offloaded 860 R&D employees at its software development operations in Karlstad, Lulea, Umea and Skelletfea to Finnish IT services firm TietoEnator for a total of SEK 500m ($55m). Through the deal, the two companies are providing product delivery, network GSM development and fixed-line services to their joint client base, and TietoEnator expects the contract to generate 90m euros ($88.2m) of revenue in the first year.
Source: Computerwire
