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Nokia To Weigh Strategic Options as Profit Pressure Mounts (bloomberg.com) 18

Nokia Oyj is exploring strategic options as fierce competition puts pressure on the Finnish network equipment maker's earnings, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company is working with advisers to consider alternatives ranging from potential asset sales to mergers, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. Other options include shifting investments and making balance-sheet adjustments, one of them said. Deliberations are ongoing, and there's no certainty they will lead to any transactions, the people said. Nokia shares have lost roughly a third of their value over the past year before news of its deliberations.
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Nokia To Weigh Strategic Options as Profit Pressure Mounts

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  • Nokia shares have lost roughly a third of their value

    Extreme profits! Or we vote to sell off every asset of the company!

    -What's wrong with the stock market again?

    • I think they're just looking for any profits at all. Nokia almost made a net profit last year and lost a fair bit of money the previous two years before that according to a quick search [ycharts.com]. I don't think this is a good case to be angry at investors for demanding something be done to get that company in better shape.
    • From TFA: Bloomberg reported Thursday

      /.er: What's wrong with the stock market again?

      Well, as we were just saying on the recent Reddit's Profane, Greedy Traders thread [slashdot.org], you get rich by either:

      A) Knowing true information which no one else knows, or else

      B) Manufacturing fake information which will move the markets [to your advantage].

      Traditionally, Mike Bloomberg [like Mark Phuckerberg] thieved his way to SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS in net worth by reading everyone's private messages [on their Bloomberg Te
  • by The Cynical Critic ( 1294574 ) on Thursday February 27, 2020 @11:52AM (#59773886)
    Nokia's had a whole bunch of organizational issues after they bought out their competitor Alcatel-Lucent stemming from having a lot of redundancies while at the same time having been blackmailed by the French government into a deal where they're not allowed to reduce the French workforce for quite a few years. Even after this French labor laws make it very hard to lay people off unless you're going out of business or leaving whole markets (so they'd had to leave mobile networks altogether to significantly reduce the size of the French division).

    What this lead to was two competing fundamental level architectures doing the exact same thing that were too different to merge, one was too fundamental to their business to their existing business to kill off and the other protected by the deal the French government blackmailed into by threatening to veto the sale. It was only made worse by the French side feeling like they were going on the chopping block and the Finnish side actually going on the chopping block to control costs after the buy-out. Thus both divisions fell behind in the race to develop 5G network tech and as a result Nokia's dead last (out of three) when it comes to their actual 5G products on offer.

    I actually know people who were laid off when they reduced their Finnish workforce to cut costs after the buy-out and according to them it wasn't pretty. Like most of their lay-offs in recent times it was pretty management-heavy (Nokia's long been overly management-heavy for years so this was no surprise), but in an effort to prevent favoritism they had the decisions on who'd get laid off done by people specifically chosen such that they didn't know them. The end result of this was that you had loads of very hard working and loyal people laid off while many much less hard working got to keep their jobs, which obviously didn't exactly do wonders for morale.

    As for how a potential merger could factor into this my guess would be that this new entity, as a new entity, would be free of their deal with the French government and could actually cut the redundancies in the French office like you'd normally do in this kind of merger.
    • Like most of their lay-offs in recent times it was pretty management-heavy (Nokia's long been overly management-heavy for years so this was no surprise), but in an effort to prevent favoritism they had the decisions on who'd get laid off done by people specifically chosen such that they didn't know them. The end result of this was that you had loads of very hard working and loyal people laid off while many much less hard working got to keep their jobs, which obviously didn't exactly do wonders for morale.

      If the good employees were the ones getting laid off, either the outside consultants paid to determine who to cut did a terrible job and whoever picked them made a bad choice, or the good workers weren't very good at actually demonstrating that they were good workers. If you're trying to accomplish some task but wind up doing a worse job than random chance that's a pretty good indication that something is horribly wrong.

      • The people who were chosen to pick those that were to be laid off and to be kept weren't consultants, they were people who worked on other teams and thus didn't really know about their performance apart from a team level.

        One person that I know had really busted his ass and worked his way to being a junior software architect before he got laid off. If you want an example of how dedicated he was to the company was one time when NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese cellphone carrier known to be extremely demanding and us
  • Idea: Find a janitor at Microsoft and make him the CEO so that he will run the company down to zero value so it can be purchased for free.

  • Shareholders are irrational these days. Just go private and run the company in a sensible way.
    • Explain how share holders are irrational in this circumstance.

      Imagine the following situation: You can put your money in a savings account at Bank A where it will earn 3% interest or you can put your money in savings account at Bank B where it will earn 5% interest. Which bank account would you put your money in and if you were a customer at Bank A why would you not consider switching to Bank B? That's basically what we're dealing with, only unlike the example involving banks there's nothing like good cu
    • Er what? They have been losing literally hundreds of millions every year.
  • The Nokia 7+ is the best phone on the market for price vs quality and specs.

  • Buying communications infrastructure made-in-China, instead of buying homegrown (Finnish/French) communications infrastructure is killing your future.

    Wake up. Cheaper is not better.

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