It will be interesting to see who's first on market with Symbian and Bluetooth products and how well they will be supported by printer, fax and PC makers. Microsoft seems to have a lot of trouble in breaching the mobile phone market... let's hope the feds will keep them occupied.
Great to see a new all time high. This leaves Lucent, Nortel, Ericsson, Alcatel, Siemens, Philips, etc. far behind in recent stock price development. It should be an optimal time for Nokia to make aqcuisitions... many small tech companies are still pretty affordable. No doubt we'll revisit eighties, but the fact that 3Q results were enough to breach the July stock price ceiling bodes well for the year's end. 100-110 is doable by January.
Good news from Motorola... they are launching the CDMA Startac in Kansas City. This means they are obviously having major production problems... this phone was supposed to underpin their 4Q come-back. Now one third of the quarter is already gone and Mot is doing the product launch in Hicksville, USA. If they had any reasonable production volume they would be pushing this in LA and New York. Over 35% of the year's phones are sold during this quarter, so it's crunch time for all phone makers. Apparently Nokia is the only major manufacturer with major new models shipping in 100 000+ volumes.
Just a couple of weeks ago Motorola and Ericsson were still making noise about hot new models in 4Q... but if they are not launched by now, they won't be able to ship enough to make a real impact by Christmas. I'd be very surprised if we don't see 110-120% sales increase in Nokia handsets next Q. The fourth quarter in 1997 was much weaker than the third one yet Nokia cruised to 94% growth in 3Q -98. It looks like 30% global market share by year's end is a cinch. After that starts the defensive battle to keep market share losses as small as possible before new platform arrives sometime before Christmas 1999. If Nokia can bottom out around 25% it's a major victory.
Tero
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