Well, Motorola's quarterly results were pretty boring. Looks like their mobile phone sales are picking up a bit... at 18% the growth should be comfortably outpaced by Nokia. The pager business seems moribund. The network sales in Europe are collapsing, probably partly because of Nokia's recent sweep. For Nokia the figures were good... no big upset in handset sector to panic investors, but growth so low it should make Nokia's numbers look swell in comparison.
I saw the new Nokia 9000 for sale at 550$ in USA, so that's very competitive pricing... all the newspaper articles have been citing 1000$ as the starting price. Perhaps this was a ploy to confuse the competition. Together with the launch of the new 6000 series, Nokia's product line in the States should get a dramatic boost in 1998. The visibility of the 9000 has been good: Business Week named it a Product of the Year, Fortune has a glowing review in the most recent issue and newspapers have run some articles as well. If they can push the price near 500 dollars they have a shot at establishing a firm position in the phone/PDA market in USA. The competition is still curiously absent. Motorola and Ericsson have no presence.
The early critical response to the 6000 series seems very strong. This is the make or break product introduction for Nokia as far as the 1998 handset sales are concerned, so the consumer response in February/March is critically important. If Nokia can't stop the Ericsson bandwagon now, Ericsson will breeze into the number one handset manufacturer position by year's end.
I'm wary of the upcoming quarterly results. The first quarter of 1998 should already show the impact of the 6000 phones, but the last quarter of 1997 will probably be somewhat hamstrung by the aging model line-up. At least the infrastructure sales should be glowing... the big order glut that began last spring should start to show in the sales figures.
It's really too bad that Nokia is introducing key products in Asia (the new miniphone for Japan, etc) in the middle of the ongoing Asian debacle. But I guess that's better than selling dated products in the middle of the Asian debacle, so there you go. There seems to be another rebound right now in Asia... let's hope it's the real thing this time. If Nokia can conquer USA with the 9000, the 6000 series and the new CDMA phones, that should balance the Asian slow-down to a degree.
Tero
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