The year 2020 might look hard but Nokia is doing well

The year 2020 has been pretty hard on human civilization, and how the situation is developing seems that we might be expecting to see a real Godzilla this summer. But, things are not so bad for Nokia, which is doing rather well in the networking business. The 5G era started well with the global ban of Huawei but later turned out that Nokia’s chipset strategy could be wrong what caused some delays and extra R&D expenses, but things are coming to normal these past few days or weeks.

Nokia announced that it is becoming the first big networking vendor to launch commercially available open Radio Access Network or O-RAN. While the current RAN systems are closed, this could turn out to be advantageous for Nokia, which might not earn as much but could attract more buyers since they could build their RAN from different manufacturers. O_RAN market share is currently at 1%, but that number might change rapidly in the near future, which means that Nokia could get a share of a cake before its main competitors Ericsson and Huawei. Nokia is calling its O-RAN the 5G Airscale Cloud RAN, and this solution has already been commercially tested on a sub 6GHz band with a fully cloudified base station. The find out more about this topic, I suggest reading an excellent post by LightReading, and the official Nokia Press release.

Nokia has also been selected by National Broadband Ireland (NBI) to deploy a fiber broadband network for 540,000 rural premises in the Republic of Ireland. Nokia will be the key supplier for IP routing and optical networking technology, and will also provide an end-to-end fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) solution.

Also, Nokia has been selected by TOYOTA Production Engineering to create a 5G private wireless network, and together with Ericsson will be creating Singapore’s main 5G network. TOYOTA will have a private 5G network to support support IoT devices, equipment digitization and visualization. In Singapore, the joint venture between Starhub and M1 said it selected Finland’s Nokia as the preferred technology partner to build its 5G network. The plan is to cover the whole island with a standalone 5G network by 2025.

This is all affecting the price of Nokia stock which is now 3% higher and looking good. Nokia is still pretty much dedicated to connecting people, but while we do miss their true dedication to smartphones, Nokia’s energy is now built in networks which are making all of us connected.

Things are looking good for Nokia, and the next 6 months of 2020 will be interesting since the new CEO and Board are taking the rudder of the company. It will be interesting to see if there is going to be some new information about the larger presence of Nokia in the consumer market.

 

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