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

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1874)	5/3/1999 11:07:00 AM
From: DaveMG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

I think the overall GSM phone sales were around 80 million units last year, I'm not sure. If the GSM subscriber adds of about 70 mil for 98 are correct then the number must be considerably higher than 80 mil. So you also haven't seen any cost comparisons between GSM/GPRS/EDGE and CDMAone/2000? Dave

To: tero kuittinen who wrote (1874)	5/19/1999 5:42:00 AM
From: Peter Tatray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

The European manufacturers dominate the scene, but the American ones get the media attention. It is a lot of apple-pie in it. But media attention creates stock prices. Analysts don't analyse very much, since they don't understand the technical details. Not even engineers understand the technical details, because there are so many of them. US analysts talk up US stocks. However, there also are other forces behind the constant "pie", which boosts US telecom stocks by a factor of up to 3.14, compared to their equivalently performing European counterparts. One is the more creative nature of US acquisition financing. You talk up the stock, go and buy expertise and market (i.e. other companies) with the talked-up stock, and arrive to the point you promised - on a roundabout route. There is not much the European companies can do about it. To do it is culturally alien to European management, even if it proved to be very successful, rational behaviour in the US. It will not be done, because the barriers in our own heads are the toughest ones to cross. Rational arguments alone are unlikely to convince anybody about anything. The other is to be present to talk about the stocks, the market, the company and the product. The public view is that journalists are where the action is, finding the important facts with a mix of applied research and pure luck. In reality, they are just like the rest of us, subjective, narrowly informed creatures being where they happen to be, capitalising on the people they know to gain information they can rely on. It is Ericsson and Nokia who have to learn to play the media game. Among other things we have to unlearn the behaviour that "we wouldn't comment such stupidities, it will blow over in time". The third point is the person of the C.E.O. Americans have learned to produce overwhelmingly charismatic TV personalities, backed up by a professional medial advisory staff, as CEO-s in high-tech, high-exposure businesses. In Europe, it seems that we still have to learn about investor relations. Some companies have more to learn than others do. Some says the C.E.O. is half of the stock price. If it is set in the US, the C.E.O. has to learn their ways. Of course, we are not talking about one person per company; we are talking top management attitudes. To summarise it, the arguments in the GSM-CDMA-W-CDMA debate might look technical, but the battle is fought on the political turf and in the media. European companies can't afford to loose it.