It's good enough. What a relief. Not stellar, though, so I guess Wall Street might throw a hissy fit. To me, the main things are that the mobile phone unit finally turned a corner and the incredible overall profit margin rise continued. 29% growth in handsets is very solid when you consider that the 6110 was introduced around mid-February and didn't start to ship in volume that month. It's especially sweet when you consider the competition. Lucent-Philips mobile phone joint venture is bleeding like a stuck pig, losing over 120 million US$ in the first quarter. Motorola's sales growth was flat. Qualcomm ran into the expected landmines; wrong estimates of consumer demand, quality problems in production, overpriced flagship product and delayed product introductions.
Against this backdrop and warnings from Motorola and Qualcomm about a bad next quarter, Nokia stands out. Next quarter should be a whopper, when the 6110 volumes swell. It will be extremely interesting to see whether Ericsson can beat the 29% growth in handsets. Nokia should be positioned for 40% in the next quarter, that should shake off Ericy at the latest. It's interesting that USA and China were mentioned as the hottest markets. These countries were Motorola's strongholds of mid-nineties and it's in these two places where it experienced the worst market share collapses of 1997. Motorola whined about weak demand in China in its first quarter announcement, Nokia names the country as a growth hot spot. Hmmmm... are they rubbing it in or something?
At least the infrastructure sales growth is something that Ericsson can't match. Over 40% is just awesome. Nokia could hit 20% share of global market very soon. I'm not so glad about the "Other" sector, small as it is. Less than 20% growth in any sector is sub-par. Is Nokia really a computer monitor company? Maybe they should think it through once again.
But that's a minor flaw when profit margins are surging like this. Operating profit increase of 58% should appease any investor. It *is* somewhat below Street estimates, though, so maybe we'll see a 5% pull-back within a week or something like that. I don't really mind.
Tero |
