Report: Nortel Mulling $1B Offers for Various Assets

$144 million (market cap) Nortel Networks ( NT ), the once multibillion-dollar telecom vendor now trading as a micro cap, may be considering offers of as much as $1 billion for its product portfolio of gear that lets phone companies string Ethernet networking to homes and businesses, according to a report in the Toronto Globe & Mail. Avian Securities’ analyst Avi Cohen argues the most likely bidders are Ericsson ( ERIC ), Huawei, Nokia’s (NOK) Nokia Siemens, and Cisco Systems ( CSCO ), with Alcatel Lucent ( ALU ) and Motorola ( MOT ) less likely because of their own titanic problems. Cohen thinks Ericsson might be more desirous of the part of Nortel that sells wireless equipment, as it would help the company get contracts with Verizon Communications’s ( VZ ) Verizon Wireless and Japan’s KDDI. Despite expectations Nortel will sell over $10 billion in goods this year, the company is expected to lose 23 cents a share on those sales. It had a billion dollars in net ... (link)