Hyvä artikkeli Light Readingissa, Lundmarkin mukaan työntekijämäärän tehostamista nopeutetaan
Nokia still looks in healthier shape than its Swedish competitor. Its net sales fell 3% for the recent second quarter compared with the year-earlier period, to about €5.7 billion ($6.4 billion). But they were flat on a constant-currency basis, while Ericsson’s fell 9%. Unlike its rival, Nokia is still profitable, too, although its net income on a comparable basis fell 29%, to €414 million ($464 million).
Despite all this, Nokia has only tweaked its profitability targets and is now guiding for a full-year operating margin of between 11.5% and 13%, down from the previous 11.5% to 14% range. After the earlier slow progress on cost reduction, Nokia is now moving speedily ahead with plans it first announced in 2021, Lundmark told Light Reading. “We said that the speed of that program would depend on how the overall macroeconomic develops and how our topline develops and we had really good development as you remember in 2021 and 2022, and that is why that program proceeded more slowly,” he said. “So now we are accelerating against those targets we then published.” The goal announced then was to reduce annual costs by €600 million ($672 million) and shrink the workforce to between 80,000 and 85,000 employees. Nokia had an average of 86,900 on its books last year, according to its most recent annual report, and the number has already dropped from 103,100 in 2018, two years after its €15.6 billion ($17.5 billion) takeover of Alcatel-Lucent. The worse the economic outlook, the smaller it is likely to be.
Bright spots for Nokia included sales to enterprise customers – which rose 27% year-on-year, to about €510 million ($571 million) – along with Nokia Technologies, the small but profitable unit responsible for brand and patent licensing. After signing a deal with Apple in the quarter, it boasted revenues of €334 million ($374 million), an increase of 10% on the year-earlier figure, and an operating profit of €236 million ($264 million).
The real worry for both Nokia and Ericsson is the financial wellbeing of their telco clients. So far, 5G has not brought any kind of meaningful sales growth for most operators, and debt levels were high at many companies before interest rates began to rise, as Lundmark recognized on today’s call. Both he and Ekholm may be right to say that traffic growth will eventually force operators to invest in network products. But as sales pitches go, it is not the most positive.
