Nokia's Present & Future

The reason Microsoft is giving him a golden parachute is proof that bringing Nokia to its knees and selling it for cheap to Microsoft was the main agenda from the start.
No it's not. This is the most ridiculous argument I've heard. It just means that Microsoft thinks it's sensible for Elop to continue do what he was already doing before they bought Nokia's phone business. Namely, lead the phone business.

I'm not arguing for or against Elop being a trojan horse though. That's a pointless thing to argue about as we'll never know. IMO he wasn't, but alas.

After completely destroying the company, people still back him up! How crazy is that?
Do you know what's crazy? I don't think I would have been able to do things any better than he did. If I had been in Elop's shoes, Nokia would probably still be at the same place we're now. Or maybe in an even worse spot.

You're telling it like Elop had such a big influence in Nokia, but I fear that things wouldn't have been much different with a different CEO.
 
You sure do have a distorted definition of "proof". :LOL:

No. That is not proof.

Bah, heavy argument then :p

Here's hoping for an investigation promted by a group of smaller Nokia stockholders to occurr and bring things to light.
 
Its most likely a 1080p screen

http://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx27&D=Microsoft+Surface+Pro&testgroup=system

Surface Pro also reports the same resolution in gfxbench.
Yes, that's 1920x1080 with 140% scaling (thus also giving an indication that screen size is similar to Surface Pro)


How would they have more money and negotiating power? If they didn't go with either WP or Android, then they just become obsolete while also missing out on MS's payments.
They had more money and negotiating power at the time Elop came in. What's wrong with not selling smartphones if that market simply doesn't offer great profit opportunities for them?
 
Nokia gets rid of Elop and Lumia and gains 35% instantly.
Microsoft takes Elop and Lumia onboard and drops 8%.

The market has spoken and could not be any clearer.
You really are clueless about the stock market, aren't you. Every company that buys most or all of another needs to pay a premium.

The reality is that Elop made sure that noone will ever know if Nokia might've done better than HTC, LG or Sony. What we did establish is that the Windows Phone strategy ended up killing Nokia's handset business. The fact that Android might not have worked out is no longer an argument.
What are you talking about? You think MS is going to liquidate the device business? I suppose you think Orton killed ATI?
 
Obviously WinMo was in decline, but in early 2011 sales fell off a cliff. My observation stands.

True, I should heed my own advice, but in this case its "check the source".
Those aren't pure WM numbers, but combined WM/WP numbers (even if your source says otherwise - but Gartner/Canalys etc. numbers won't add up otherwise). That makes the chart even more useless and the sharp decline easily explainable: Q1 2011 are still a mix of WM/WP (~1.6m WP sold in Q1, rest WM), and WM devices stopped shipping afterwards (~1.5m sold in Q2, basically all WP).
And remember: The last new WinMo device came out in 1Q2010 (IIRC, could also be 2Q), as well as the last update. WinMo has been officially abandoned and deprecated by both MS and handset makers long before 2011. Everything in late 2010/early 2011 WM sales was basically stock emptying.

When you or others declare that Nokia could have made more money with an alternative strategy, that Elop wasted a cash cow, or that the losses were mostly the fault of the memo, then yes, you are indeed denying this transition which strikes at the bulk of Nokia's business at the time.
And that's because....? Regurgitating your claims doesn't make them more true.

Oh give me a break. Long term product plans are known for many companies and are never a valid excuse for a precipitous sales drop.
Whaaa...? Osborne effect, anyone?

You're grossly overestimating the number of people who are aware of and affected by such announcements. BB10 wasn't demoed until May 2011 (and thus unable to affect May 2011 quarterly results, which is when sales dropped), and at that time it wasn't even known that existing devices could not be upgraded to it.
No, I'm not overestimating. There are enough documented cases it's practically Business 101.
And you know who IS especially aware such announcements? a) Carriers b) Enterprise Customers. a) -> indirect impact on consumer market b) -> DIRECT impact on enterprise market.
And I think you have a lot backwards in your recollection. It was basically a Double Osborne, with both BB7 (earlier announcement, belated launch, no upgradeability for older hardware) and BB10 (well, same points but much worse). And before the end of May you had: March earnings call announcement, April: Tablet OS (based on QNX), Start of May: BB7 devices (and it was known from the beginning that 6.1 dev. couldn't be upgraded)


The point stands. Blackberry sales turned down right around the same time as Nokia's despite no association between the companies. They simply both had dead end operating systems across their product lines.
Astounding. You have a simple correlation between two (completely different, by your own admission) companies, no other supporting argument than "they both had a dead end OS" and think your point stands?

Of course market share is the point. If your sales can't keep pace with an increasing market, it's because you don't have competitive offerings. If Elop was so devastating, why isn't there any drop in the marketshare trajectory when he arrived? What's your explanation there?
Aaand another strawman. Market share only shows your performance relative to others. (Which no one was debating here.) But it doesn't show how well your company itself is.
You want relevant graphs?
Here we go:
EK3Se3s.png

c6B9rjT.png


Made by myself for the earnings reports. I would have loved to include earlier numbers and profits/losses, but sadly nokia didn't report separate smartphone numbers before 2009 and doesn't report separate losses (smartphone/feature phone) in the devices division at all. Look at my previous link for a quick loss overview. (which basically start in 2Q2011)

He never denied that premise, though, and I didn't use it as proof. He is saying Nokia would have been better without WP or Android, and I'm asking him how.
C'mon, don't play stupid. You know which part of your quote I meant.
 
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Do you know what's crazy? I don't think I would have been able to do things any better than he did. If I had been in Elop's shoes, Nokia would probably still be at the same place we're now. Or maybe in an even worse spot.

You're telling it like Elop had such a big influence in Nokia, but I fear that things wouldn't have been much different with a different CEO.

I'm pretty sure Nokia would've done better with you as CEO :LOL:

Elop hit Nokia like a biblical plague. Or maybe that's unfair. Come to think of it any random swarm of locusts would've probably made for a better CEO.

Seriously though. Nokia was not exactly in imminent danger of extinction when he joined. There are turnaround stories for companies that were in worse shape.
 
They had more money and negotiating power at the time Elop came in. What's wrong with not selling smartphones if that market simply doesn't offer great profit opportunities for them?
So the third option you're talking about involves selling off the devices division in 2010/2011 to some chump for 2-3x the $7B that MS paid? Or spinning it off into an independent company?

I suppose you have a point there. It's not something that anyone else brought up in this thread. But Nokia expected their margins to stay on their feature phones and entry level smartphones, so I don't think their board seriously considered that.
 
You really are clueless about the stock market, aren't you. Every company that buys most or all of another needs to pay a premium.

For a healthy company with other possibilities, certainly. In this case, they got a total bargain (lest you forget, when Elop took over 3 years ago, the market cap was $40 billion, most of it due to Nokia's handset business). They ended up getting it for $5 billion.

Did the market cheer this shrewd purchase? After seeing Lumia's tepid adoption and the value of the WP brand, it did anything but.

What are you talking about? You think MS is going to liquidate the device business? I suppose you think Orton killed ATI?

Nah, think MS will play around with the remains of Nokia's handset business for a year or 3, kill the Asha component as soon as possible, lose more market share overall, and eventually announce it will become some completely new and improved mobile initiative. Which will fail once again, as usual.
 
Not every time one quotes another means he's trying to say the opposite, sometimes one might actually just provide a link to strengthen a point in the quoted text, in this case the freefalling market share

Sorry, you're right. I was still in "argument mode". :)


The reason Microsoft is giving him a golden parachute is proof that bringing Nokia to its knees and selling it for cheap to Microsoft was the main agenda from the start.

Naah, please. Have to agree with the others here. Calm down with the conspiracies.
 
WinMo has been officially abandoned and deprecated by both MS and handset makers long before 2011. Everything in late 2010/early 2011 WM sales was basically stock emptying.
Fine, but it is still proof of a market transition. MS would not deprecate it if they could keep selling it as WP grew. They never stopped selling win98 when XP came out, or XP when Vista came out, etc.
And that's because....? Regurgitating your claims doesn't make them more true.
I didn't regurgitate anything in that quote. If you and others are saying that Nokia spoiled a cash cow, then you are unequivocally saying they could have kept selling their not-so-smartphones through time of transition. It's complete denial.

Whaaa...? Osborne effect, anyone?
There was never the type of hard announcement that in any way can be called an Osborne effect and affect results for Q1 2011.

And I think you have a lot backwards in your recollection. It was basically a Double Osborne, with both BB7 (earlier announcement, belated launch, no upgradeability for older hardware) and BB10 (well, same points but much worse). And before the end of May you had: March earnings call announcement, April: Tablet OS (based on QNX), Start of May: BB7 devices (and it was known from the beginning that 6.1 dev. couldn't be upgraded)
Show me a historical case of the Osborne effect that came from such a weak definition of future product announcement. There is no way that you can blame RIM's 1Q2011 results on this. By your definition the iPad mini should flop from speculation of the next model having a Retina display.

RIM's prevalence through enterprise also makes it even easier for them to coast because they have far higher costs in changing platforms than a typical consumer and are also much slower to do so. That they still stumbled shows how much consumer demand transitioned.

Astounding. You have a simple correlation between two (completely different, by your own admission) companies, no other supporting argument than "they both had a dead end OS" and think your point stands?
Buddy, it's FIVE operating systems. WinMo (doesn't matter whether it's due to customer choice or MS's perception of customer choice), RIM dying, Apple growing rapidly, and Android rocketing up in 2010 (surpassing Symbian by year's end).

Aaand another strawman. Market share only shows your performance relative to others. (Which no one was debating here.) But it doesn't show how well your company itself is.
So what? A company can't control demand for an existing class of product. It can only control how well it does relative to others in providing it. A few quarters ago Intel saw shipment declines despite kicking AMD's ass more than ever before.

The total smartphone market will go up and down depending on consumer sentiment/hype, seasonal variation, the economy, etc. The only way Nokia can change that is through a revolutionary product, which maybe 0.1% of CEOs are capable of initiating, and none could do in a few quarters.

1. Your claim is that Elop's memo notably changed consumer preference for Nokia. Agreed?
2. Nokia's marketshare, by definition, shows the percent of buyers who prefer Nokia. Agreed?
And yet you are completely unable to show any correlation between Elop's memo and quarterly marketshare loss. That is not a strawman. That is a gaping hole in your argument.

Your graphs show Nokia's shipped numbers, but we all know that manufacturers play tricks with these through inventory stuffing in one quarter versus the next. Nokia having 22% growth in smartphone revenue from 3Q2010 to 4Q2010 is unlikely given that Gartner shows their sales going from 29.5M units to only 32.6M units over the same timeframe.

That Q4 number in your graph is a mirage from an all-time peak of 100M smartphones sold that quarter and, IMO, Nokia trying to make FY2010 look as good as it could.

Take 1000 random smartphone buyers in Q1 2010, and you'll find 443 choose Nokia.
In Q2, 412.
In Q3, 366.
In Q4, 326.
Q1 2011, 274.
Q2 2011, 221.

There is no anomalous change in trajectory from the Q1 2011 memo. It was an accelerating decline that started before Elop even arrived.

C'mon, don't play stupid. You know which part of your quote I meant.
You're just being an ass now, and Xmas's response proves it. He was talking about Nokia not making phones in 2011. I was not "disproving" anything he said, I incorrectly assumed what his mysterious third option was, and he clarified it.
 
For a healthy company with other possibilities, certainly. In this case, they got a total bargain (lest you forget, when Elop took over 3 years ago, the market cap was $40 billion, most of it due to Nokia's handset business). They ended up getting it for $5 billion.
No, a premium is always needed in a buyout. If a company is not healthy, then its stock will be lower than it used to be, but you still need to offer a premium to buy it out.

By your definition of bargain, Blackberry is one right now. Only $5.7B market cap, and it used to be $36B 3 years ago, and $65B+ at its peak. Run, Florin! Buy shares of this bargain!

The reality is that Nokia was heavily overvalued before Elop took over. Nobody knew that its featurephone business would lose value so quickly, or that its not-so-smart-phones would become obsolete so fast.
Did the market cheer this shrewd purchase?
You're all over the place. In one sentence you're saying MS got a bargain, and in another you're saying MS bought dead weight.

Nah, think MS will play around with the remains of Nokia's handset business for a year or 3, kill the Asha component as soon as possible, lose more market share overall, and eventually announce it will become some completely new and improved mobile initiative. Which will fail once again, as usual.
Yeah, just like XBox failed. And how Skype lost users after the acquisition.
 
The reason Microsoft is giving him a golden parachute is proof that bringing Nokia to its knees and selling it for cheap to Microsoft was the main agenda from the start.

Seriously? Do you really think any CEO could do anything like that? The CEO can't do anything the board of directors doesn't approve.
 
ToTTenTranz seems to be emotionally invested in Nokia and for some reason cannot accept the basic fact that companies routinely fuck up - no need for any sort of conspiracies.
 
If Nokia didn't throw up their hands and say "hey our next gen platforms that we've been working on for years are hopeless and we're going to junk them" would it have plummeted as quickly?

Would they have sold less of the Symbian and Meego phones than the WP phones that they've sold?

Did NOK go up when they signed on with MS? It's certainly gone down since.
 
No, a premium is always needed in a buyout. If a company is not healthy, then its stock will be lower than it used to be, but you still need to offer a premium to buy it out.

Haha, you know what I'll just quote the first hit on that snarky link you thought I needed:
Investopedia said:
There is no requirement that a company pay a premium for acquiring another company; depending on the situation, they may even get a discount.

Do you have any more wisdom to impart on M&A, Mintmaster? It is highly entertaining.

Mintmaster said:
By your definition of bargain, Blackberry is one right now. Only $5.7B market cap, and it used to be $36B 3 years ago, and $65B+ at its peak. Run, Florin! Buy shares of this bargain!

You may have accidentally said something insightful for a change. There's a number of people doing exactly that at the moment. Me, I think it has some ways to go.

But I actually did buy Nokia in May and some more in August. Made a sweet profit cashing out on the news.

I also reinvested some in MSFT on the dip. I'm counting on the unshakable faith of people like yourself to bring it back to $33.50 - $35 eventually ;)

The reality is that Nokia was heavily overvalued before Elop took over. Nobody knew that its featurephone business would lose value so quickly, or that its not-so-smart-phones would become obsolete so fast.
You're all over the place. In one sentence you're saying MS got a bargain, and in another you're saying MS bought dead weight.

Yeah, just like XBox failed. And how Skype lost users after the acquisition.

Another $8.5 Billion well spent, I have to say :LOL:
 
Perhaps you could come up with examples of similar stock movements that actually make for a meaningful comparison if you gave it some thought.
You're using MSFT falling 8% as if that's some kind of big deal. If you look at the MSFT stock price over time, you wouldn't be able to spot it.

MSFT dropped 12% in one day on July 19th, 2013. A month later it was almost back where it was. The volume was 250M shares, similar to the Balmer retirement announcement, compared to your 150M.

On January 24th, 2013, Apple dropped 13% from $513 to $450 because of lower than expected numbers. They didn't announce buying 30000 employees from a company that became complacent, just numbers that weren't as perfect. The stock is now back where it was.

How about on september 12, 2001, when the market suddenly thought that not just one company but whole US economy suddenly was worth 15% less on one of its highest volumes ever. Only to reverse itself a week or so later.

But I'm really not interested in arguing that stock market psychology is rational, particularly in tech. I do think it is notable that the market's gut reaction said Ballmer bought another stinker.
My gut reaction is that using the market's gut reaction in anything other than a discussion of market psychology is a sign of desperation. It devalues whatever other smart argument may come after.
 
The total smartphone market will go up and down depending on consumer sentiment/hype, seasonal variation, the economy, etc. The only way Nokia can change that is through a revolutionary product, which maybe 0.1% of CEOs are capable of initiating, and none could do in a few quarters.

What should I think of this paragraph when already your first claim has been completely wrong for the last few years - where the total smartphone market only knew one direction: UP.
And your second claim is a) ridiculously oversimplified and b) completely ignores the fact that "immediately switching to WP and abandoning the rest" was NOT the only possibility of executing change. But slowly I don't think anyone could ever change your mind about that...

1. Your claim is that Elop's memo notably changed consumer preference for Nokia. Agreed?
2. Nokia's marketshare, by definition, shows the percent of buyers who prefer Nokia. Agreed?
And yet you are completely unable to show any correlation between Elop's memo and quarterly marketshare loss. That is not a strawman. That is a gaping hole in your argument.
It's a strawman in that no one was arguing that Nokia was losing (unit) market share, but that at least Nokia was healthy from a business POV before (profitable, at least slightly increasing revenue, enough cash reserves) and that this shows that such a radical and immediate break wasn't neccessary and did more harm than good. And I already showed you the correlation re: Sales and Profits.
But if you insist...the graph you provided makes it look linear, but when you look at the numbers, it paints a different picture:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/263438/market-share-held-by-nokia-smartphones-since-2007/
1Q10-1Q11: 38,8%->23.8% = -38,6% market share loss
1Q11-1Q12: 23,8%->7,8% = -67,2%
1Q12-1Q13: 7,8% -> 2,8% = -64,2%
Is nearly doubling the market share loss enough for you?


Your graphs show Nokia's shipped numbers, but we all know that manufacturers play tricks with these through inventory stuffing in one quarter versus the next.
Exactly. Everyone does that. Your point being...?

Nokia having 22% growth in smartphone revenue from 3Q2010 to 4Q2010 is unlikely given that Gartner shows their sales going from 29.5M units to only 32.6M units over the same timeframe.
*sigh* Yes, Gartner is completely correct. (Well, mostly, since these are Symbian numbers. Nokia numbers are lower, but the ratio is roughly the same.) UNIT shipments rose roughly 7%. And now the kicker: ASP per Unit
rose ~15%. And that makes? Tadaa: 22%.

There is no anomalous change in trajectory from the Q1 2011 memo. It was an accelerating decline that started before Elop even arrived.
See above.

You're just being an ass now, and Xmas's response proves it. He was talking about Nokia not making phones in 2011. I was not "disproving" anything he said, I incorrectly assumed what his mysterious third option was, and he clarified it.
It's not your assumption, but the foregone conclusion you drew: Not going immediately to WP or Android -> definite obsolescence.
 
Could we open a new thread specifically for all the Nokia conspiracy theories? They're not adding anything to this thread anymore IMHO.
 
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