Nokia: Oops, financials aren't great. Never mind, 5G will solve our woes Fallen mobile phone giant Nokia posted financial results today that did not make happy reading for investors. For the second quarter of 2018, Nokia reported sales of €5.3bn (£4.7bn), down 6 per cent on the same period in 2017. At the same time, operating profits (non-IFRS) sank by 43 per cent from €574m (£509m) in the year-ago …
Time was when making any kind of profit was a good thing.
Now companies are analysed, dissected, examined, and the city "wizards" make projections which are held to be sacrosanct, therefore any company failing to meet those imagined targets has failed.
Given the recent turmoil in this company at the hands of Microsnot, the mere fact that they still survive in any form whatsoever is a remarkable achievement in itself.
There are also rumours going around that Nokia's 5G programme -- which they're relying on to save the company -- will be badly hit because they decided to use Intel's 10nm process, which is hugely delayed (3 years now?) getting to yield good enough for mass production, and this could be fatal for the company.
https://semiaccurate.com/2018/07/02/intel-custom-foundrys-10nm-meltdown-is-crushing-a-20b-market-cap-tech-giant/
https://semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?9139-Intel-s-10nm-fiasco-is-going-to-kill-a-mystery-tech-giant&p=302289&viewfull=1#post302289
Should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, but it's public information that their ReefShark 5G chipset uses Intel 10nm so I wouldn't bet on this rolling out any time soon.
"but it's public information that their ReefShark 5G chipset uses Intel 10nm so I wouldn't bet on this rolling out any time soon."
That would be a phenomenially bad decision, however considering that "Nokia Networks" is both a child of Nokia and Siemens this becomes absolutely plausible.
For reference, Siemens spun out their semiconductor department to Infineon... then Infinieon spun out their memory chip department to Quimonda which then went bust in the next cycle.
Siemens Healthcare also re-branded itself as part of a employee demotivation campain into "Siemens Healthineers". Complete with a dance routine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Healthineers#Controversy
Assuming the rumours are true, it looks like a bad decision only with the benefit of hindsight...
Rewind 3 years or so (typical development time for chips like this) to when Nokia (or whoever...) had to decide on a silicon supplier, and Intel were promising that their 10nm technology would have better PPA and cost than anything else and was going to be available earlier too, so going with it instead of the obvious foundry process (TSMC) must have looked like the way to get an unassailable lead on the competition. I also know from a previous life that Intel were offering very attractive wafer prices to try and bring in new foundry business, which looked very tempting at the time.
And if Intel had delivered 10nm when they originally promised -- or even now, only a couple of years late -- this would all have worked, and Nokia (or whoever...) would have a product with no competition and cleaned up the market. But with no end in sight to the Intel 10nm fiasco which now doesn't look like it will be able to yield big chips (which I expect ReefShark is, even if not as big as Ice Lake) until well into 2020, this could indeed be a complete disaster for Nokia (or whoever...)
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