The incremental progress of Nokia’s Alcatel-Lucent acquisition continues following the completion of the initial public exchange offer, resulting in Nokia now holding nearly 80% of outstanding A-Lu shares.

Alcatel-Lucent is listed in both France and the US, further complicating the convoluted process required for one public multinational to acquire another. In this case the French stock market authority, Autorité des Marchés Financiers, is the main facilitator and it oversaw a whole bunch of arcane manoeuvring of minimal interest to anyone outside of the financial sector, but which seems to have gone well.

“We are delighted that the offer has been successful, and that Alcatel-Lucent’s investors share our confidence in the future of the combined company,” said Rajeev Suri, President and CEO of Nokia.

“We will move quickly to combine the two companies and execute our integration plans. As of January 14, 2016, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent will offer a combined end-to-end portfolio of the scope and scale to meet the needs of our global customers. We will have unparalleled R&D and innovation capabilities, which we will use to lead the world in creating next-generation technology and services.”

While Nokia is looking to get the ball rolling ASAP in 2016 history shows much of the year may be spent doing boring things like integrating, streamlining and other corporate calisthenics. As anticipated in the Telecoms.com 2016 predictions Nokia’s competitors will probably take this opportunity to bolster their end-to-end offerings too.