Nokia's Present & Future

[Mize]

Actually in the short term the layoff and restructuring are a much larger cash hit.

 

[french toast]

Holy sh*t. i dont wanna believe such things, certainly microsoft would gain an enormous amount, for a start microsoft knows how to use a patent portfolio, nokia has maybe the most feared amongst mobile, after all they are one of the very few to make apple back down and pay up, makes you wonder what might have been had they been hostile in 2007...

 

[Mize]

Holy sh*t. i dont wanna believe such things, certainly microsoft would gain an enormous amount, for a start microsoft knows how to use a patent portfolio, nokia has maybe the most feared amongst mobile, after all they are one of the very few to make apple back down and pay up, makes you wonder what might have been had they been hostile in 2007...

It makes perfect sense. In many ways Apple has always been Microsoft's enemy (in spite of making plenty of profit on Apple as well) and Apple's model for cell phones is a fricking printing press for cash. They make money on hardware and software and all software sales.

The companies that should most worry about such a scenario are Samsung & HTC (amongst others) as one could imagine a future not far off where Google, Microsoft and Apple (and maybe RIM) are selling closed products with no need for the phone manufacturers. What OS would Samsung and HTC have to turn to? Nokia's killed MeeGo, Open webOS hasn't been released. Bada is, well, Bada which leaves only Tizen which is far from a done product and I don't think HTC's on board with that one...

 

[french toast]

Your right it does...for microsoft, if they have a brain they will snap nokia up pronto.

 

[Mize]

By the way, there has to be a translation error here. For this to happened (WP to capture 7% of the Chinese market in just 2 months) would mean sales of over 10 million phones per month in China - nearly 100% of all smartphones sold for those two months would have to be WP.

I think the claim will be revised to 7% of new phone sales during those 2 months were WP, not that WP has captured 7% of the smartphone market.

Well here's the new recap!

From ABI research (via Engadget):

Table: Select Smartphone Vendor Shipments, 1Q'2012

(Millions of units)


Apple 35
Huawei 6.8
Nokia 11.9
RIM 11.1
Samsung 43
Sony 7
ZTE 4.9

So Nokia claimed to capture 7% of the Chinese smartphone market in two months - which would mean selling 20 million handsets *in China alone* over two months.

Instead the reality is they sold only 11 million units *world wide*

 

[warmi]

Especially when you have to pay the salaries of 125 000 people...



Given that he's now hiring his fellows from Microsoft while at the same time firing most of the executives over at Nokia, that's not even a "secret" by now.




Assuming he won't get arrested for purposedly destroying Finnish/European patrimony.
Everything Nokia's BoD does right now is so blatantly destructive that someone is eventually going to get into trouble.

Arrested for what ?

This is a serious question.


My take on it is that Nokia was already way behind the game when he was brought in - in other words, Nokia had to bet on something and make it big quickly because , being so short on time, they couldn't afford anything less risky.

And so they did - you may not like their choice and in fact it may hasten their demise but being wrong on these matters is not criminal ( unless you are in China or some place like that)

 

[french toast]

Being wrong is not criminal, but the question is if he is purposely devalueing the company so his old employers can buy it for half price....

If microkia buy Nokia, then he will have some serious questions to answer, as Nokia was making profit and symbian was growing before his strange announcement.

He also hampered another well selling platform that had a greater demand and could have brought in some revenue whilst wp was taking hold (meego), the fact that he was a senior employee of Microsoft before taking over Nokia, who have been linked with a takeover of various mobile companies for ages, doesn't exactly help his cause.

The other fact of his extremely questionable decision making during his short stay, leading a profitable company to record lossess and halfing it's share price since he was employed also looks a tad shady would you agree?...

 

[lefizz]

Nokia are simply in a mess because they reacted in an unfocused way to the release of the first iPhone. Years later they were still mostly deoendant on symbian which while fast and reliable felt about as sexy and modern as DOS. They also spend hundreds of millions developing operating systems they didn't release

Almost every other mobile producer reacted very quickly. Samsung jumped on android, developed Bad a, and kept supporting the various windows flavours.

If anyone acted criminaly it was Nokia prior to selecting W7. Which was probably its only option because there were too many players established on Android by they time it was realised an external OS would have to be bought in.

Arrogance and incompetence have put Nokia where they are now. A failure to see how the iPhone would change everything lost them 5 years ina market that reinvents itself every year.

 

[french toast]

Yes Nokia messed up bad, however all the r&d had gone into updating that tired old symbian, which ironically despite support being pulled the last 12 months is now very android like experience akin to gingerbread,with the benefit of running smooth on arm 11 single core processors and 256-512 mbps ram.

Not forgetting meego which is also resource friendly and class leading swipe.ui on launch which won over the sceptical Weston media who clambered for it to get support.

What did flop do? He actually put the skids on the n9&950 as soon as he arrived, despite both phones being nearly ready to ship near Christmas 2010.....when the n9 did release (mid 2011)and got raving reviews, flop hampered its potential by cutting support and advertising, not releasing it worldwide in Nokia strong holds, only in developing countries at a quite ridiculous retail price....done in no doubt to make it fail.

Despite that it outsold the entire wp7 ecosystem.
Both symbian and meego shared the same qt software platform for easy development and porting so there was a complete top to bottom product plan in effect when he took over.

Despite what Weston media would have you believe symbian was very popular the world over and that told with its sales and market share, yes it needed to change and Nokia had to come with a solution for the Weston markets which wp7 was a very good long term choice, but ditching the setup in place for a completely unproven system didn't benefit Nokia...it benefited Microsoft.

Like I said if Microsoft do take over he will have some serious questions to answer.

 

[wco81]

Actually, with the market cap driven down, there could be other suitors.

Google could buy it. Hell they paid more for Motorola.

Or a number of companies could get into a bidding frenzy for those patents. So there's no guarantee that MS could be the successful bidder for the fire sale.

 

[french toast]

Thats naive to say the least, the fact that Microsoft have their foot in the door with their man running the company, their software running the show....you don't think that gives them a massive advantage?

Also Google wouldn't be allowed to buy Nokia.

 

[wco81]

Well the Nokia board may approve a sale to MS but if someone else bids higher are they going to ignore that?

Why would the DOJ and the EU favor MS over Google as the buyer or vice versa?

 

[lefizz]

Cos Google own Motorola?

 

[french toast]

Cos Google own Motorola?

Bravo! Also your thinking about things in pure monetary terms, the "special relationship" or intertwined engineering know how of both companies have built up and of course the fact that another complete turn around would bankrupt Nokia means that Microsoft at this stage would actually be the most sensible buyer, I doubt anyone else has the kind of free money kicking around Microsoft has, who also has the industry know how/ip /cash to turn Nokia around.

As stated before it's almost too late to do a u turn on operating systems, so wp it is then and also highly unlikely Microsoft would allow another company to outbid it for risk of throwing its own company down the drain should it lose its best mobile platform.

That's with out elop, likely many other pro Microsoft employees brought in and likely aggressive board room sweep stakes Microsoft is known for (yahoo).

 

[silent_guy]

Pando Daily has an interesting take on the financial situation of Nokia:

At its peak in the early and mid 2000s, the company fell victim to its own hubris. It began thinking of itself as an unassailable winner of the future, as a mature company that didn’t need to invest in the next big thing. Rather than spend its resources on building a next-generation software ecosystem—an OS that depended on novel interfaces and sensors, that allowed for outside development, that offered a brilliant user experience—the company “managed down” its cash by paying huge dividends and buying back its shares. Between 2003 and 2008, while Apple launched the iPhone and Google perfected its Android strategy, Nokia spent 27 billion euros just on dividends and repurchases.

Ouch. Such a bucket of money would have been really useful today.

 

[rpg.314]

Why would the DOJ and the EU favor MS over Google as the buyer or vice versa?

Why would Google buy a dead end like Nokia? Patents? Isn't Motorola enough?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Pando Daily has an interesting take on the financial situation of Nokia:

Ouch. Such a bucket of money would have been really useful today.

I think it's actually the most shallow article I've seen about this subject.

He actually thinks the burning platform memo was a good thing, he thinks Elop is doing great and the only reason Nokia is going down is because of something like bad luck, because the Lumias are great phones and they sell good in North America.



In short, he's just spewing everything Elop says in press releases and shareholders conferences.

 

[french toast]

Agree, it's a monumental travesty this has happened to Nokia
also Google couldn't buy Nokia outright as it's anti competitive bit they might be able to bid for the patents if they ever went up.

Nokia's patents are gold and Mich better than Motorola's, they would have been even better had they been like apple and not made industry standards out of almost every smartphone tech we now take for granted and locked them down... another thing many apple owners take for granted as they sneer at Nokia.

Sad.

 

[rpg.314]

He actually thinks the burning platform memo was a good thing,

The memo was the right thing to do. It was just too late. It should have been sent out the day iPhone was outed.

 

[silent_guy]

He actually thinks the burning platform memo was a good thing, he thinks Elop is doing great and the only reason Nokia is going down is because of something like bad luck, because the Lumias are great phones and they sell good in North America..

Totz, we know your opinion on that, no need to repeat it. What I didn't know was that Nokia pissed away $27B and finds itself now in dire need of cash.