Hi Paul, I visit the QCOM thread every now and then... they love and respect me there. But basically, my investment strategy is to learn as much on one topic as possible and stick to that. Right now, the big story is Mot's collapse and the main beneficiaries are Nokia and Ericsson. I'm long on them. Ericsson's handset line-up is getting stale and I think that Nokia will have a much stronger winter in that sector. But Ericsson's infrastructure sales are very strong, so I would maybe get one Ericy for every two Noka stocks to hedge my bets. I just don't see Alcatel, Nortel and Lucent as strongly positioned as Noka and Ericy, so I'm not long on them now. Lucent is very richly valued and has a loss-making handset subsidiary, Nortel just got out of handsets and sold its R&D operations to Nokia and Alcatel is struggling with its mobile phone unit.
I think that the mobile phone sales growing at 40% annually worldwide, a good mobile telecom firm should have both a solid infrastructure division and a solid handset division, to spread the risk if nothing else. Right now only two companies fit the bill. Moreover, Wall Street is still not valuing fully Nokia because it has a bizarre background. The company has an extremely low profile, very little coverage in internet or business journalism. It does not suffer from exorbitant P/E ratios that come from overexposure. Motorola is number one institutional investment target in USA... when these conservative people finally decide to bolt, they will be looking at some other large, well-known mobile telecom company to fill the hole. I have my suspicions what it might be.
Tero
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