OK, now we'll see the color of our guts... NOKA is down by 5% in Helsinki and it will probably get worse. Stand firm, crew... no panic-mongering. We've been nominated the leading eurotrash thread on SI, after all.
The big question is whether to buy now or after yuan is devalued. I'll probably try to buy some this week and some later, just to spread it out, because guessing where the bottom is can be perilous.
Some thoughts for the long and possibly bloody week: no matter how much economic turmoil will hurt Nokia, it's gonna hurt its rivals even worse. I don't care how much China eventually devalues: Nokia has a chain of factories and subcontractors in place within the country. It will get hit less than most of its competitors. The worse it gets, the bigger assets Nokia's massive profitability and Chinese production facilities will be. In the end the strategic benefit of weakened competition may well outweigh short term grief Nokia has to go through.
Chaos in Asia will cause untold human suffering and it would be tacky if not morbid to view it in context of mobile phone competition... but as usual, I can't help myself. GSM as an established standard will probably fare better than CDMA... countries will think twice before they invest money in a second standard. Nokia's Asian expansion is already well under way. The companies that are only beginning to venture there will face a lot of trouble in financing their push.
A plethora of companies already reported troubling mobile product numbers in the first half, including Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, Philips, Sony and Alcatel. Nokia really was the only top five company to buck the trend. If all of these companies now face diminished profit growth in the near future for Nokia it will be a bump on the road... but most of the rest will dip so deep into red ink they may be forced to consolidate. Lucent/Philips union already showed us that combining two mobile phone units is a potential nightmare: different technologies can be very hard to mesh. So the coming wave of mergers may actually leave the companies involved less weakened: mergers resulting from desperation and mutual problems often do. That is why I'm not too worried about the rumoured Motorola/Alcatel fusion. This ain't no Daimler Chrysler.
Maurice, the display stuff sounds interesting, I have to learn something about that stuff. What's Siliscape?
Have a nice day... and remember that Nokia has always dived deeper and faster than most of the competition. But it has always bounced back faster and higher as well. It's like a lucrative rollercoaster that gives you chills and thrills but also pays you when you climb out.
Tero
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