THE WRAP: India unplugs 25m as Nokia sees better 2010

This week India took millions of mobile users off the air as Nokia forecast a better and more streamlined 2010.

Two years after selling off its mobile unit, Lenovo bought back in for $200 million, or twice the sale price.

 

Samsung hiked its sales forecast, as rival Nokia said it expected 10% growth in handset shipments next year after a fall in sale in 2009. After introducing around 20 smartphone models in 2009, it plans to halve its portfolio in 2010.

 

Nokia Siemens expects the infrastructure market to be flat in 2010 believes it can make a slight operating profit. Engineering firm Siemens took a €1.6 billion ($2.4b) charge on its 50% share of the JV.

 

NSN offered $810 million for Nortel’s optical networks and Ethernet unit and went to court in to re-open bidding. The judge said the application was too late.

 

A European court ordered France Telecom to repay €1.14 billion ($1.72b) in back taxes over exemptions claimed by the carrier between 1994 and 2002.

 

Nokia filed suit against 11 LCD-makers, alleging they colluded to fix prices for ten years.

 

Google responded to Murdoch’s campaign against search engines by offering to limit the number of free clicks through to premium web sites.

 

Operator spending on networks fell 10% in Q3, mostly due to a slowdown in China’s 3G rollouts.

 

China Mobile suspended billing for all of its WAP sites as part of the latest communist party anti-porn sweep.

 

Telstra is aiming for an IPO next year for SouFun, its China real estate portal which is said to be worth $1 billion. It tapped CSL chief Tarek Robbiati as the new head of its international division, which will now be based in Hong Kong.

 

BT admitted its chairman was the only person in an English village with a broadband service. Other residents had been told they were too far from the exchange.

 

Yahoo and Facebook struck a deal to allow users to link directly with each other.

 

Japan launched a satellite to spy on North Korea. 

 

“Twitter” was among the top searches of 2009 on the Bing search engine, and a company which monitors language has crowned it the top word of the year.

 

And a Dutch teenager gave his Twitter news feed, with 1.5 million followers, to MSNBC.