Nokia Has Two Unwanted Businesses Left and No Buyers in Sight

Nokia entered 2026 with four underperforming units grouped into a “portfolio businesses” division, and it is still trying to sell the last two. Inseego bought the fixed wireless access customer premises equipment unit in April, and Aurelius picked up the enterprise campus edge business that serves private networks this week. What remains are the site implementation unit and the microwave radio unit, both still in limbo almost a year after the group was formed.

The financial picture explains why the buyers have been slow. The four units together produced about EUR 900 million in annual revenue with collective losses of EUR 100 million, according to Nokia’s update last November. The first-half numbers for what is left are thin: combined revenue fell about a third year over year to EUR 131 million, and net losses rose 70 percent to EUR 39 million. Growth did return, with first-half sales for the remaining portfolio businesses up 15 percent year over year, and a small operating profit of EUR 2 million against a EUR 17 million loss a year earlier.

Aurelius claims ECE generates more than EUR 170 million in annual sales. Combining that with the reported first-half total implies the FWA CPE unit accounts for roughly EUR 46 million of sales. ECE also carries about 1,000 employees, which puts revenue per head near EUR 170,000 and well below Nokia’s group-wide figure of about EUR 255,000.

The valuation gap is what the market is arguing about. Nokia and Aurelius did not disclose the financial terms of the ECE transaction. Nokia reclassified ECE into discontinued operations in its second-quarter report, moving it next to the FWA CPE unit, and it expects the divestment to lift comparable operating profit by roughly 5 percent.

What the remaining sale really affects is the customer conversation. Analysts have noted that buyers of site implementation and microwave equipment are reluctant to commit to suppliers whose ownership may change again, and that the assets could end up with a less creditworthy owner than Nokia. Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis wrote on LinkedIn that the deal gives private-network customers a measure of predictability, and he added that a private equity firm will look for its own exit at some point.

Nokia’s own guidance has already moved. It finished 2025 with 74,100 employees once the acquired Infinera optical business of about 3,000 people is excluded, down from a year-average headcount near 92,000 in 2020, and it has raised its restructuring charge guidance to EUR 800 million from EUR 250 million while confirming site closures in China.

The divestment programme plays out against a vendor market that Dell’Oro Group tracks every quarter. The research house put worldwide telecom capex up about 5 percent year over year in the first half of 2026, with equipment revenue growing by roughly the same rate, and its September report describes operator spending shifting from coverage toward capacity, modernization and automation. Dell’Oro expects capital intensity to ease to around 14 percent by 2028 from a peak of 18 percent in 2022, and puts capex growth at 0 to 1 percent a year through 2030.

Supplier’s note: Site implementation and microwave assets changing hands is the part of this story that reaches our warehouse first, because integrators and tower contractors ask us what happens to spares when a business unit is sold. We keep microwave transmission units, radio units and their associated line cards and power modules in stock in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, with ready-to-ship units leaving inside two working days and full pallet orders taking one to two weeks where a specific band variant has to be pulled from allocation. Where an OEM unit has been discontinued we quote cross-reference equivalents from comparable power and frequency classes and list the hardware revision for each unit before it is packed. Field returns we see most often are corroded waveguide flanges, failed fans in coastal cabinets and power supply boards damaged by voltage spikes, so every microwave shipment leaves with spare gaskets and a matched power module. Wholesale carriers, tower contractors and network integration firms running site rollouts of 10 to 40 sites are the usual buyers, and orders arrive as mixed pallets priced per site once freight and duty are quoted.