Tero,
In Nokia's 1994 annual report, they reported full year sales of Telecommunications systems (almost all of which was wireless infrastructure) of FIM 6.9B which is approximately US$1.4B based on exchange rates of the day. This is, in fact, about the same as Motorola and 12% more than Lucent. Now it is true that Nokia is now 15% larger than Lucent and 20% larger than Motorola, but the story you paint is wholey innacurate. Where are you getting your data? The numbers for telecommunications infrastructure sales are in the financial statements on Nokia's own web site. Nokia, Lucent and Nortel were all late to the wireless infrastructure party. A decade ago, Motorola was neck and neck with Ericsson in a two horse race. Perhaps its true that Motorola was distracted by developing too many radio platforms, but Mot's paltry share of CDMA infrastructure would indicate that it likely wasn't the case that it over fixated on CDMA to the exclusion of GSM - perhaps you are thinking about iDEN? I stand firm in my belief that MOT's downfall was its inability to develop a digital switch.
LU has not had a market share advantage over Nokia in wireless infrastructure at any time over the last 7 years, much less a 4-6 times advantage. However, it has kept pace with the growth of the mighty Nokia over that time frame. Sit silently for a moment and contemplate on this contradiction of your basic thesis.
Nokia is one of the world's truly great companies, and we have been heavily overweighted for a long time. However, let's not make up "facts" to support this thesis, since the truth is enough. |
