Analyst: Ericsson bid for Lucent likely

Ericsson refuses to comment on recent media reports suggesting it is planning to steal Lucent Technologies away from a proposed merger with Alcatel. And a Reuters story today said analysts view an Ericsson/Lucent merger as unlikely. But at least one analyst claims Ericsson insiders are serious about plans to acquire Lucent.

Citing recent conversations with “extremely good” contacts “deep” within Ericsson, Eve Griliches, IDC research manager, told Telephony today, “Ericsson is completely abuzz right now [about] going after Lucent.”

Outbidding Alcatel, which proposed a merger of equals with Lucent last week, will be a difficult task, she said. And Ericsson may not be successful. But the Swedish vendor has the will, she said, and it has the money to spend.

“Ericsson has about $18 billion in cash to spend right now,” she said. “They are hot to trot to spend it on the wireline business as soon as possible.”

An Ericsson/Lucent merger might even make more sense than an Alcatel/Lucent one, she argued, because Ericsson, as a primarily wireless vendor, has less product overlap with Lucent than Alcatel does. Some analysts have argued that Alcatel and Lucent could exact great synergies from their common product areas, such as optical and Sonet gear, but Griliches believes those products will be hard to synergize in part because they were designed in competition with one another.

“The [Lucent] product people are not thinking about what synergies they have with the Alcatel department,” she said. “They’ve spent all their time trying to figure out how to argue against those products. [Realizing synergies] will take a long time.”

Ericsson gained a wireline portfolio through its acquisition of Marconi last year, but much of that wireline gear is based on the European SDH technology, not American Sonet, so the products complement one another. And because the Marconi operation is smaller than Lucent’s, the two groups wouldn’t fight for dominance. “We know who would be wagging who,” Griliches said.

As an added benefit, a Lucent acquisition would also give Ericsson the assets of carrier Ethernet equipment vendor Riverstone Networks, which Ericsson attempted to acquire earlier this month before being outbid by Lucent in the end.

“[An Ericsson/Lucent merger] would give Ericsson an entire wireline portfolio,” Griliches said. “This would enlarge their whole footprint everywhere. Ericsson is not looking [for] piecemeal [acquisitions]. They’re active in getting the whole kit and caboodle with Lucent.”