Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Pekka Lundmark: Yes. I mean, of course, 355% growth is not something that you should expect to continue forever. It has been an incredible growth period in India. Of course, the investments continue but we would expect there to be the moderation in the second half. And the overall result, I guess, will be that 2023 will be an exceptional year in India for sure. We will see some normalization in 2024. But we have to remember, if you compare this to the past that we have taken market share because we broke into big time into Reliance Jio which was 100% Samsung previously. So despite the fact that there will, of course, be normalization in 2024, we believe that in a way the new normal, the new run rate that we will see for our business is India will be clearly higher than what was the case before.

David Mulholland: We’ll take our next question from Daniel Djurberg from Handelsbanken.

Daniel Djurberg: Yes, a question on, you can say, other early high-margin 5G countries, such as Japan and South Korea, et cetera. What do you see there in the outlook? Looking at KDDI, for example, it seems that they are doing some kind of 5G 2.0 rollout, for me at least. And also if you can comment a bit on Western Europe and the trend in the replacement of Chinese gear would be interesting.

Pekka Lundmark: Okay. Thank you, Daniel. If I take the Asia Pacific question first. I mean, we are in a strong position in many of the operators there including KDDI and we are seeing some improvements in the outlook over the next 12 months. Too early to quantify, of course but it is going to the right direction. In Europe, we did have pretty good growth. And there, we are taking market share. And I think we have all the possibilities to continue to take market share in Europe. We have to remember that, of course, there is always a connection to the overall economic activity. Some of the operators in Europe are not that strong in terms of their financial strength at the moment which is clearly affecting their investments at the moment but we are taking market share.

Fundamentals in Europe, if we compare that to the other parts of the world is the fact that Europe is significantly behind 5G rollout compared to many other parts of the world. So sooner or later, if and when Europe wants to take care of its competitiveness, Europe will have to start investing more in 5G. This is also something that I believe Brussels have understood very well and we would assume that the various regulatory and other discussions would develop to a direction where more investments would be encouraged going forward because this is clearly something that Europe would need big time.

Daniel Djurberg: I agree. May I have a follow-up on IP networks? I think you said that they expect to grow with 6% with cyberscale — hyperscale as well some roughly flattish or 1% with CSPs. Can you comment a bit on the competitive differences between these segments, i.e., your ability to get gross margins out of those two?

Pekka Lundmark: The — obviously, the different segments operators, hyperscalers and then various enterprise verticals in terms of IP routing, they vary. Our focus has clearly been traditionally in CSP routing and namely within CSP routing in CSP edge routing. So now we have two trends which is then also connected to our R&D priorities. One thing is that we are kind of leveraging our natural strength to expand from edge routing to core routing in CSP networks and we have some really promising traction here. Sales cycles are often fairly long here. But with the help of FP5 and the other new stuff that we have, I believe that we have good possibilities there because in edge routing, our market share is in the high 20s. In core routing, it is single digit.