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

To: Typhoon who wrote (1163)	11/19/1998 1:22:00 AM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

The truth about V series. Now it can be told. As usual, Phill Bertolus from that quirky Web Wombat is ahead of the curve with his excellent site. Here's the sneak peek at V series: webwombat.com.au This is the linchpin of Motorola's 1999 comeback strategy. The reason why Nokia's market share is anticipated to come under furious assault. A phone with a 14 number display... where number ID does not fit on one line. Imagine scrolling through your phone book with this puppy - it can't even display the names tagged to numbers. Some background here: Nokia's shift into using five line displays that can show entire sentences of e-mail or short messages in every new Nokia model was born of an interesting discovery. When mobile phone pentration topped 25% in Finland the use of data traffic spiked sharply. Currently over 50% of teenage phone use is exchange of text messages, not voice contact. No generation Y consumer would be caught dead with a phone that can't deliver and send text. Among business users Reuters headlines, weather forecasts, e-mail and stock prices are the new killer application. The same trend is emerging in rest of the Europe, driven by heavy advertising of operators who seek to expand their income by selling content from stock data providers, etc. Motorola's response: a perverse devolutionary step back into the era of a mobile phone as a mere voice communication device. It's an interesting example of Motorola's engineer-driven corporate culture triumphing over consumer trends. This company was derided for years for delivering digital phones that were branded as "Motorola bricks". The accusations of Mot phones being used to hurt people in physical assaults must have hurt deeply. So deeply that the company decided to launch a phone that finally gave them the bragging rights of making the world's lightest phones outside of Asia. Too bad they had to dump the engine of mobile phone sales growth in 1999 and 2000; the data capability. The V series is priced so high that the obvious target is business users. The very group that is shifting into using mobile phones for text delivery. This is where Nokia's heavy market research once again gave it a jump over competition. Both 61xx series and V series where planned in 1995-1996. But only one company anticipated the internet and short message revolution taking place a couple of years in the future. We all know the drill by now: Motorola will ship V series in such small quantities that it can declare that they are selling out immediately. Impressed Wall Street jacks up the stock price. The moment of truth will arrive in 3Q and 4Q 1999. If Nokia's market share is still topping 30% in USA, Europe and China we'll know who made the right call back in 1995. Tero