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

To: gdichaz who wrote (5052)	5/29/2000 11:14:00 AM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

No, Chaz - the question is who has the negotiating power and who doesn't. Nokia does not need licensing fees. The company could care less if the 3G rates are set at 2%. Apparently Nokia is now sharing this low fee attitude with China, Korea, NTT-DoCoMo and Ericsson. That is good company to be in. Those people who have been whining about how Nokia is only a "prince" and how Qualcomm is a "gorilla" and how CDMA is a "tornado" got too giddy with their fancy little metaphors. If Qualcomm is forced to negotiate the licensing fees down again and again, it loses the only real advantage it has; certainty about the size of future IPR revenues. It is possible that Q got too greedy and is now running against a brickwall of resistance towards exorbitant IPR fees and proprietary approach to standardization. I suggest that China is not "frosting on cake". It is the most important single country in the mobile telecom markets. GSM subscriber base will hit 70 million there this year; now here we have a genuine tornado. This vortex is sucking in Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, Singapore, Philippines, etc - these countries are taking their cues from the Chinese GSM explosion. The increasingly obvious reluctance of Unicom to embrace IS-95 is already reverbating across Asia. Koreans can't say no to W-CDMA if this would hamper their access to the Asian 3G market. Hong Kong and Singapore have to invest robustly in GPRS and W-CDMA to stay in step with the Chinese. Australia is tipping over to GPRS and W-CDMA whether you admit it or not - just visit Telstra's website and check out what they are up to with Lucent. The top two Japanese operators are off to the W-CDMA races. DDI is not even a chimp in this company. The graveyard I'm whistling by has a moldering tombstone marked "cdma2000". Can't wait to see Piecyk and Cena do another fancy song & dance routine later this week and explain once again about the "7-3 sales ratio" between W-CDMA and cdma2000. Qualcomm has grossly misjudged its influence by trying to cram cdma2000 through. This has prevented it from embracing W-CDMA and concentrating on the product development in this space. No company this small can effectively concentrate on two 3G standards simultaneously - you place your R&D bets and then live with your decision. There's a good chance that Motorola also made a nasty miscalculation when it hedged its bets between W-CDMA and cdma2000. It's not a coincidence that the W-CDMA market seems to be forming into a three-way race between Ericsson, Nokia and Nortel. The US companies Motorola and Lucent probably won't end up in the top three; thanks to Qualcomm's efficient lobbying in favor of cdma2000. Q has really had a major effect on the US telecom industry. Torpedoing Motorola's and Lucent's 3G strategies is a hell of an achievement. Tero