Nokia acquired Alcatel-Lucent, the French telecom equipment company, back in 2016, to better compete with the likes of Huawei in the network infrastructure industry.
If you have minimum knowledge about the mobile phone market, then you most likely have heard about Alcatel, a brand that’s very popular at the mid- and low-tier. It turns out that the Alcatel brand was among the assets owned by the French company when Nokia announced its acquisition.
Clearly, that means that after the acquisition the Alcatel smartphone brand would belong to Nokia. However, the Finnish company did not mention anything about the brand one year ago after it bought Alcatel-Lucent.
It was only recently that Nokia confirmed that when it acquired Alcatel-Lucent, it learned that the Alcatel brand was licensed to Chinese company TCL, the same that owns the license to launch BlackBerry-branded phones, for many years.
The above statement comes from Nokia and confirms TCL has the license to launch Alcatel smartphones and tablets for seven more years. So, more money for Nokia, right?
