***lbp***Tero, quite right on growth of Sony versus Nokia. But Sony products are not commodities. Sony is a large, low risk, high quality, good, Mom and Pop or Investment Fund place to put a few shekels. I've admired Sony since 1974. Nokia since 1996 [though I hope they don't get lured down the Pinnochio road by L M Ericsson to Pleasure Island where work and honesty are banned and lying bad boys are in favour]. Nokia has done brilliantly and deserves a premium over Sony for carrying off a major success in a highly competitive, highly technological industry. Incidentally, I'm one who initially assumed Nokia was Japanese. Good for Nokia to recognize the potential of CDMA and be an early licencee.
You said: "Nokia was the only company in the world that had the guts and vision to bet the entire corporation on mobile phone boom in the late eighties. They sold off everything else and jumped from the cliff, certain that their wings were strong enough to carry them."
While that might have been admirable, do you not see a parallel with a company which bet the ranch on a totally new mobile phone technology, disparaged as contravening the laws of physics. Nokia's risk was only to adopt widely recognized analogue and GSM technology.
They had only to solder a few wires and chips together and hire some Estonian plastic injection moulders and assemblers at distress prices after the USSR collapse.
Qualcomm has taken on those with dollars, research, markets, years of lead; everything. Then created a major international corporation creating the wireless world from chips, handsets, operating software, Eudora, infrastructure and service providers to Globalstar for worldwide wireless communications and GPS. Then shifting the world to cdma2000 technology for multimedia and a million other applications. They are just getting warmed up.
Now that's flying!
True enough though, Nokia is doing very well in their GSM/analogue handset specialty. It's good for them that they are also in the cdmaOne handset market.
Using your GE rule of thumb, it is a certainty that Qualcomm Incorporated will be on GE's shopping list. "Number one in its field."
Mqurice
PS: SurferM, Tero was pretending he can write Japanese "Watashi wa biiru suki desu", as well as pidgin English. I think you picked it as a drinking chant, but did you think it Finnish? I've been giving him English lessons for two years now and he's made good progress don't you think? He said he had come to Silly Con Investor to learn English. Really, he did! And Mike, it's Scandinavia, not Scandanavia or Scandalmania - though Dog knows what they get up to in their saunas on a cold winter's night. |
