Nokia and Sanyo announced today that they will not be forming the new CDMA device company preliminarily announced in February.

The Finnish company said on it would pull out of CDMA phone manufacturing, which it sees as a shrinking market in the longer term. Recent developments may indicate that the CDMA emerging markets business is looking more challenging.

Both companies have a bitter history over technology licensing and patent infringement cases and Qualcomm laid down new terms for the Sanyo-Nokia venture that were unacceptable to Nokia.

Based on joint negotiations and extensive analysis, Nokia and Sanyo concluded that it is more beneficial to pursue other options individually for their CDMA handset business.

Moving forward, Nokia intends to selectively participate in key CDMA markets, with special focus on North America. Planning to ramp down its own CDMA R&D and manufacturing by April 2007, Nokia will continue to offer Nokia-branded CDMA handsets, made by contract manufacturers, in North America where the standard is popular.

"We feel it would not be in our best interests to make an agreement that proved to be less beneficial than originally anticipated," said Kai Oistamo, Executive Vice President, Nokia, Mobile Phones. "After exploring all available opportunities and making every effort to create a sustainable CDMA business, this is our only viable option."

Sanyo and Nokia will announce their future plans for their respective CDMA businesses in due course.

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1. Posted by mgoblue	Fri Jun 23, 2006 10:24 am
I was looking forward to seeing what the Nokia - Sanyo venture would bring. Lame.
2. Posted by booboy	Fri Jun 23, 2006 4:27 pm
apparently qualcomm doesnt have any problems. althought it would have been nice to see cdma nokias.
3. Posted by mgoblue	Sat Jun 24, 2006 1:10 pm
Geez... I never knew Qualcomm had so much power.
4. Posted by McGirk	Thu Jan 11, 2007 7:35 pm
Essentially Qualcomm owns the chips used by the CDMA technology, so they have all the power in the CDMA world, ever notice that many Alltels all say Qualcomm on them even though they have a different manufacturer, it's sort of like Intel Inside for cell phones.

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