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Technology Stocks : Nokia (NOK) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: A.L. Reagan who wrote (4172)	4/14/2000 10:09:00 AM
From: t2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Nokia's U.S. head says mobile sales may rise-paper newsalert.com Company Digest To print this story April 14, 2000 05:17 Nokia's U.S. head says mobile sales may rise-paper HELSINKI, April 14 (Reuters) - Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia's head of U.S. operations said handset market penetration in the United States may accelerate now that it has topped 30 percent, Finnish daily Kauppalehti reported on Friday. "Up to now, penetration has risen by about five percentage points a year. The speed may pick up going forward since 30 percent has now been broken," Nokia's U.S. chief Kari-Pekka Wilska told the newspaper. At the end of 1999, the U.S. mobile phone market's penetration rate -- the relative number of the population with a mobile phone -- was 31.6 percent, the paper said. A growth spurt also typically takes place once market penetration reaches 20 to 30 percent, Wilska said. "After that growth has clearly accelerated in all markets around the world," he said. "At this stage mobile phones become a consumer product," he said, according to Kauppalehti. Nokia sold 78.5 million handsets last year, or 29 percent of the 275 million units it estimated were sold worldwide. It has said it sees one billion mobile subscribers by the end of 2002. Nokia was the clear market leader in the U.S. with 35.7 percent of the market at the end of 1999, according to research firm Dataquest. The U.S. mobile phone market is largely price-driven and still oriented towards low-end phones, but that is changing with consumers tending to trade up to higher-end models once they buy their second phone, Wilska told the paper. Wilska said that Nokia's current production capacity for the United States, with plants in Texas, Mexico, Brazil and South Korea, was sufficient to meet demand, Kauppalehti said. Nokia has about 7,000 employees in Texas, up from just 150 seven years ago, and it is now building a fourth building at its Dallas-Fort Worth campus and has room for a fifth, Kauppalehti said. Copyright 2000

To: A.L. Reagan who wrote (4172)	4/14/2000 11:44:00 AM
From: Terrapin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

Hi A.L., "Maurice - I agree with you 100% on network effects. So does NOK, which is why it is now pushing W-CDMA so hard as the 3G migration for the GSM crowd. I fear that some of our QCOM friends ignore this stuff and cling to the better mousetrap theory of alpha primacy. (There's a mixed metaphor!)" I am inclined to think that a corollary of the network effect is that nobody will have to push W-CDMA very hard. If we can agree on a few points: 1) The current 'network' is predominantly GSM. [I think most will agree with this one; remember I am not talking about growth rates but real subscriber numbers in actual, worldwide, working networks.] 2) The most cost effective upgrade of GSM is to W-CDMA. [This will probably provoke the most discussion. I certainly do not know the answer and I imagine the equation is different for each network provider.] 3) A network provider will evaluate a technology based on cost of implementation and potential for future return on that investment and NOT simply on the 'best' technology. [The distinction here may be slight but suffice it to say the very 'best' technology may not provide a return that is significantly larger than the competing technology to justify the potential premium that is often associated with 'best' technologies.] Just some thoughts. And don't worry about the mixed metaphor; as far as I know mice still have alpha males. Terrapin