NSN is losing the Siemens name without sacrificing the NSN acronym. The world’s second largest maker of mobile broadband equipment has changed its name to Nokia Solutions and Networks. NSN is now wholly owned by Nokia (NOK), which is spending $2.2 billion to buy Siemens out of the joint venture that the two companies formed in 2006.
“While our name and brand have changed, I would like to emphasize that our overall strategy and our focus on mobile broadband remain the same,” said Rajeev Suri, who is continuing as CEO of NSN. Under Suri’s leadership, NSN has recovered from the economic downturn and has been profitable for the past year, despite an increasingly competitive environment. The same cannot be said for NSN’s parent company Nokia. Once the world’s leading mobile handset vendor, Nokia has struggled to compete in the smartphone market, and NSN is now the most profitable part of its business.
The name Nokia Solutions and Networks is more than a way to maintain the NSN acronym. The word “solutions” reflects NSN’s growing commitment to software as a service. As carriers demand more intelligence from their networks, infrastructure providers are responding with solutions like NSN’s Liquid Radio 3G software suite.
NSN has made it clear that it intends to compete head-on with its lower-cost competitors going forward. The company recently put the world’s largest carrier, China Mobile, into a tricky position by reportedly undercutting local vendors Huawei and ZTE in a bid to supply China Mobile with more than 200,000 TD-LTE base stations.
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