Nortel: Fishing for New CDMA Bids?

Wireless Week has an interesting story about a conference call held by Nortel (NRTLQ.PK) on Thursday, purportedly about the “realities of the current CDMA market”.

However, Wireless Week’s Maisie Ramsay opined that the conference call “sounded suspiciously like a sales pitch for its CDMA assets”, which Nokia (NOK)/ Siemens (SI) has bid for acquire for $650-million (along with Nortel’s LTE R&D unit).

In the story, ABI Research analyst Nadine Manjaro suggests the real purpose of the conference call was to attract higher bidders for the CDMA business before an auction is hold on July 24.

“The Nortel call today was to tout Nortel’s true value, which will potentially increase bidders,” she told Wireless Week. “All of the recent press has been more on the negative side so it was an effort to say that even though the company is going through bankruptcy, the assets are still valuable.”

From the outside looking in, it appears Nokia Siemens would get a sweet deal for the CDMA business, which had about $700-million in profits last year on sales of about $2-billion.

Even though sales and profits are expected to sharply decline as the CDMA business loses market share, it is interesting there have been no other bids or even expressions of interest.

However, Bruce Gustafson, Nortel’s VP of strategic marketing, suggested there were offers out there. “If you’re assuming there are no additional bids because there’s no public disclosure, you’d be mistaken,” he said.

Meanwhile, Matlin Patterson, an investment firm that buys distressed assets, is working on a buy-out offer for Nortel with speculation it will sell the enterprise business.