Lava rekindles hope for Nokia’s Chennai unit employees

It seems the Finnish handset-maker Nokia has got a buyer for its Chennai manufacturing unit. If market sources are to be believed, the Indian handset-maker Lava is in talks with Nokia to buy the latter’s non-operational Chennai factory. For this, the two companies have already signed a nondisclosure agreement.

The deal, if struck, may bring hope of re-employment to the former employees of the plant.
As per the news sources, the manufacturing team of Lava has visited the plant and did their assessment. Now, it is all set to put forward a proposal to Nokia in mid-December after taking all aspects into consideration. However, Nokia’s ongoing tax issue with the Indian Government needs to be sorted out before signing a final deal.

This issue had prevented the Finnish company from transferring the factory to Microsoft as part of a global $7.2-billion deal to sell its devices business to the US company. The tax row is in the court and the factory is non-operational after Microsoft decided to stop using it from November 1.

Nokia has already communicated to Lava that it is in talks with the concerned authorities over tax and lease-related issues. It has asked Lava to continue with the assessment since there are high chances that these issues would get resolved soon.

Lava was earlier in talks with the Chinese original equipment manufacturer (OEM) Vivo for setting up a manufacturing unit, but it failed.

Well! It is difficult to say anything confirmed about the deal between Lava and Nokia as nothing has been announced officially. So, stay tuned to varindia.com for further updates.