More than two years after it last made an acquisition, Nortel Networks Corp. continues to insist that it will grow through M&A. Yet the company's inaction and the multiple weaknesses in its product lines have left industry analysts rolling their eyes.

The most recent acquisition talk came out of Germany, where Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski told a newspaper that "if the right opportunity for an acquisition arises, we will of course look at it."

In an interview reminiscent of company statements from a year or even two years ago, Zafirovski also stressed that Nortel, after long being distracted by an accounting scandal, was "a normal company again," eager to move forward after a number of challenging years.

Zafirovski declined to comment on reports from earlier this week that Brampton, Ontario-based Nortel was considering a joint venture with troubled cell phone and telecom gear maker Motorola Inc. that would combine the companies' wireless infrastructure units.

The interview, published in the Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung newspaper, helped boost Nortel shares roughly 13% Wednesday. But analysts doubted that the struggling company would right the ship through acquisitions.

"We remain skeptical of any transformative M&A and believe Nortel faces a challenging road in 2008," wrote Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Vivek Arya in a research note Thursday.

The last time Nortel made an acquisition was in December 2005, when it bought Tasman Networks Inc. for $99.5 million. Even then, the company was already trumpeting its return to growth mode, but no acquisitions have followed since.

For the most part, analysts have stopped speculating about what Nortel might buy, although last September, CIBC World Markets analyst Ittai Kidron highlighted the company's enterprise business as one that could benefit from M&A. The unit's revenues were growing rapidly, but the business still had what he described as "material gaps" in its product portfolio.

Targeting enterprise customers has been one of Nortel's areas of focus since it entered a venture in 2007 to jointly develop business communications products with Microsoft Corp. In November, following a meeting with Nortel executives, Kidron said that he was impatient with the pace of change at Nortel, which would need to use M&A and partnerships to accelerate its growth rate.

UBS Investment Research analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos has similarly made repeated calls for Nortel to pursue acquisitions, particularly in its wireless businesses. Following reports of the potential joint venture with Motorola, Theodosopoulos said that such a deal would at least help the company streamline costs, although he said that it would not necessarily accelerate growth because of the substantial overlap in the two companies' businesses. - Andrea Orr