Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Nokia falls heavily on the stock market

The action of the world's leading mobile phones, Nokia, has still fallen heavily on Wednesday 1 June. By late morning in the Helsinki Stock Exchange, the title Nokia fell 7.6% to 4.39 euros, its lowest level since January 1998. The Finnish group was waived Tuesday in achieving the objectives it had set a few weeks ago, raising questions about the ability of its new general manager to orchestrate the recovery promised in February.

At the Helsinki Stock Exchange, Nokia had the title then fell 15.0% to EUR 4.90 in the afternoon. In New York, the action has also dropped to 17%. Stephen Elop, the Canadian CEO of Nokia, said during a conference call that the worsening situation came from a fierce competition in China and Europe, where he is concerned about the penetration of phones running Android, the system Google's operating.

"We see lots of Android phones on the market," he said, saying worry "a lot" for the market share of Nokia. "Clearly there is pressure on prices" for Nokia smartphones. The Finnish group, long the undisputed leader of mobile phones, saw its supremacy undermined in recent years, with the democratization of smartphones.

Nokia remains the world's largest manufacturer of mobile handsets in volume, and its CEO, Stephen Elop, launched three months ago an overhaul of the phone business, which was reflected in particular the adoption of the Microsoft OS at the expense Operating System Symbian house. Nevertheless, Nokia said Tuesday that net revenues from services and materials in the second quarter would be "significantly below" its projection made in April, which ranged from 6.1 to 6.6 billion euros.

PARTNERSHIP WITH MICROSOFT CAN SAVE NOKIA? These new projections imply a loss is probable in the third quarter, analysts say. They add that they also indicate that the position of Nokia in the market is deteriorating faster than expected, the competitors - Asia in particular - increasingly strengthening their positions in a market such as China.

"What we find truly amazing is the level at which the markets have fallen and are called now dead, which for a slip is a slip," said Lee Simpson, an analyst at Jefferies. Stephen Elop expects to deliver in the fourth quarter combined in the first operating system from Microsoft, which has not yet been proven, but analysts fear that Nokia has lost so much ground in the meantime that back in the race is painful.

"Given the internal disarray that this announcement will cause, it was increasingly difficult to imagine that Nokia makes a great leap forward and is tied with the competition in early 2012," said Thomas Langer, an analyst at WestLB. "Investors may be more concerned about the possibility of a dividend." A month ago, Nokia announced the loss of thousands of jobs and the outsourcing of its Symbian software to reduce costs.

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