Prelude to Nokia World 2009: The 1st Checkpoint ...
Sisu Man,
A month ago in your well crafted post that finalized with "MEASUREMENT CHECKPOINTS" your 1st checkpoint, sensibly, was Nokia World in Stuttgart in early September.
The prior week NOK closed on NYSE at $13.20 before dipping to the low $12s again and we closed Friday at $13.86 after opening above $14 for the 1st time since earnings with its rather depressing forward guidance. All things considered that minor price movement wasn't bad since we are mired in the dog days of August.
Whatever upwards movement we saw was primarily due to press and product release staging for Nokia World which begins on Wednesday and concludes before our Labor Day weekend begins. It will be interesting to see how Nokia closes on Tuesday September 8, the 1st post 'summer' close when analysts and blogalysts are back to work and have digested whatever Nokia has served up at Nokia World.
The article that follows touches on at least part of what has been staged for us and it'll be interesting to see what else is left to reveal and how the event frames Nokia's transition from a Products to a Products AND (software, services, and content) Solutions Company.
Headed into the event, I think they have done a masterful job of staging and there is already a lot to chew on. I do hope they'll position the parallel Symbian and Maemo product platform tracks more distinctly for us at the event, but I suspect they may wait for the Maemo Summit 2009 (October 9-10-11) in Amsterdam, and Symbian Expo (October 27-28) in London to pull back the kimono much further, since there is no sense revealing too much of their strategy to competitors.
>> Is the N900 the Final Element of a Nokia Comeback?
Michelle Maisto
eWeek
2009-08-29
tinyurl.com
This summer Nokia introduced the Symbian-based N97, the Windows-running Booklet 3G and now the Linux-based N900. Along with its Qt Developer Frameworks, are these the building blocks of a comeback for the industry’s No.-1-but-slipping handset maker?
Nokia introduced its first Linux-based phone on Aug. 27, the robust N900 smartphone. It features a 600MHz ARM processor, an iPhone-size high-definition touch-screen, up to 48GB of storage and an open-source, Linux-based operating system called Maemo.
The N900, which will join us some time in October and retail in the neighborhood of $700, followed on the heels of Nokia’s announcement that it will “bring its rich mobility heritage and knowledge to the PC world” with an Intel Atom–powered, Windows-operating netbook called the Booklet 3G.
These followed the June debut of Nokia’s flagship N97, a device the company’s tempted to call a smartphone, though Nokia prefers “mobile computer.” It runs the Symbian S60 5th edition operating system.
Three instances make a trend, as any magazine editor will attest, but for Nokia—the world’s largest handset maker, which of late has seen market share slip, as well as average selling prices fall faster than the industry average—do they constitute a comeback? Or at least the necessary elements to lead to one?
“The N900 QWERTY phone and Booklet netbook are useful steps in the right direction for Nokia,” analyst Neil Mawston, with Strategy Analytics, told eWEEK.
“Nokia needs to regain share among high-end consumers in rich countries, and launching feature-packed 3G devices is one way of doing that,” said Mawston, adding that it’s only half the solution.
“The other half will be to build closer relationships with operators in major countries worldwide where it is currently under-represented, such as the U.S.A., Japan and South Korea,” he explained.
Analyst Ken Hyers, with Technology Business Research, sees the devices as a means toward future success.
“Today's netbooks are little more than underpowered laptops, but Nokia's vision is to make a separate class of devices that are more capable of performing mobile computing tasks,” Hyers told eWEEK. “I think that the N900 is part of Nokia's strategy to establish a beachhead in the mobile computing space.”
Pricing, however, is likely to prevent either from registering with the majority of consumers today, Hyers said, but that may be fine.
“I think Nokia is taking the long view with these devices, devoting the time and effort now to develop these so that by the time the mass market catches up to it, Nokia will have these classes of devices really well-tuned.”
In June 2008, Nokia purchased Qt Software, now known as the Qt Development Frameworks. In a recent research note, Hyers described Qt as being “widely used for developing in Linux, the Mac OS X, Windows and Windows CE. Applications developed for these platforms are more easily ported to platforms that also support Qt, enabling developers to create an application once and deploy it across multiple platforms with minimal changes.”
Reuters reports that Goldman Sachs expects Nokia’s value share for $350-plus phones to fall to 13 percent this year, from 33 percent two years ago, and eQBank analyst Jari Hondo told Reuters: “Maemo’s got to be the best bet Nokia has in that battle.”
TBR's Hyers told eWEEK that Nokia “is betting that by focusing more on open-source platforms and eliminating barriers to development, a greater number of developers will choose to create applications for its devices, allowing the company to better compete with other smartphone platforms.”
Analyst Roger Kay, with Endpoint Technologies, objected to the term "comeback." “What they need is to regain momentum,” he told eWEEK, saying that in the United States we have a less clear picture of Nokia, which is far stronger and more dominant in Europe.
“I’m not sure if these new categories are actually the winners, but I think it’s good for Nokia to be experimenting like this and putting out new products and taking risks. … If they don’t do anything, they can be assured of a decline,” he said.
"That's really the way to go: take a higher-risk stance and try to shake some life into the company, get it moving.” ###
Cheers,
- Eric - |
