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

To: DaveMG who wrote (1258)	12/17/1998 10:27:00 PM
From: DaveMG	Respond to of 34857

Tero, Just had to add one more thing.Since you've already decided you want to own QCOM regardless of how the standards fight turns out, by not buying now you are actually betting that WCDMA will be able to move ahead without Q. A hedger would start taking a position right here... Dave

To: DaveMG who wrote (1258)	12/18/1998 9:34:00 AM
From: tero kuittinen	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 34857

Not so fast, buster. Qcom will be attractive after the market has absorbed the W-CDMA decision and panicked. Right now there are many unbased assumptions built into Qcom share price (such as CDMA in China, a concept still religiously covered in US media). Just like Ericsson is still to absorb further punches (another came today when an Ericsson executive gave a starkly pessimistic interview in a Swedish newspaper... the word on the streets of Stockholm is that the new phones will not be produced in high volume until autumn of 1999). GSM subscription base is projected to pass the wireline user base in the near future. That's right - there will be more GSM users than people who own a fixed-line telephone. If this does not mean that GSM has a "future" I don't know what does. GSM is no topping 20 million subs in China - that will mushroom above 200 million. I'd characterize this as both "future" and "growth". The capacity constraints in major Chinese cities is a very real and immediate concern. That is why expanding to GSM-1800 is unavoidable. And that is why expanding to W-CDMA (or some other 3g solution) will become unavoidable within five years. Nokia is now trying to entangle China in W-CDMA in the same way they managed to get GSM to become a key part of China's domestic high tech industry. I'm not seeing any cdma2000 networks being built in China today. An interesting anecdote - Finnish industrial production of "electronic goods" skyrocketed by 57% in October. This number is a good indicator of how much Nokia is exporting from Finland (as opposed to Estonia, Hungary and other low-cost countries). This, in turn, is interesting, because it reflects the production of Nokia's most expensive, sophisticated products - the only kind that it makes sense to manufacture in Finland. The fact that the October growth surpassed all projections means that not even Finnish economists have expected a growth surge like this. And they were supposed to have revised their projections to reflect Nokia's current growth. Tellingly, newspapers here are now publishing two sets of numbers - Finland's industrial production growth without the telecom cluster (-1%) and with it (+8%). Tero