Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Pekka Lundmark: Well, we are, of course, not giving specific guidance on gross profit, but it is clear that the regional mix development will put a pressure on Mobile Networks gross margin in 2023. But as I said, we do expect that we will be able to mitigate that drop with scale benefits, technology development and normalizing supply chain. So the drop will not be that dramatic as if we only took the different €“ the price differences between different regions. So there are mitigations that we can use. And we have taken all this into account when we have then put together this 7% to 10% operating margins. So once again, gross margin, we are not guiding. We do expect that Mobile Networks will be the fastest-growing one of our four businesses this year.

So that obviously is a supporting element to the gross profit that you asked, lower gross margin is then taking some of that away. But the overall result is that we expect 7% to 10% comparable operating margin. Then when it comes to 2024 and 2025, we are not commenting at this stage other than confirming that our aspiration in the Mobile Networks business is to get to double-digit profitability.

Marco Wiren: And then just building over what Pekka said that also in the aspiration slide that we showed earlier, we have an aspiration to gain market share in the longer run. So even if markets are going up and down, so the market share gain is definitely in our aspirations.

David Mulholland: Thank you, Daniel. We’ll take our next question from Richard Kramer from Arete Research. Richard, please go ahead.

Richard Kramer: Thanks folks. If limited to one question, I wanted to ask Pekka. One of the challenges in the last few years has been visibility both on component supply and also in customer demand. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how €“ whether your raised margin targets in NI and MN are a function of having a clear picture or visibility of customer demand? And can you comment a little bit on your book-to-bill ratio ending 2022 and what you expect in terms of development? I think you mentioned a bit about seasonality, but do you now have a good view of what you expect for the full-year of 2023 with operator spend? Thanks.

Pekka Lundmark: Okay. Thanks. That’s a great question. We actually start this year in relative terms with a stronger order book than what we started last year when you compare the order book to the stated target. So that gives us confidence on this year’s outlook. We had a good book-to-bill in our businesses in 2022, which then helped to build this order backlog for 2023. Now what will help, of course, is then the fact that the supply chain has more or less normalized from availability point of view. Then of course, I do not want to get into details on pricing on semiconductors. There’s a lot of negotiations going on. People try to understand where the prices will go. But availability has normalized. What has not normalized is lead times.

And that is one of the reasons why we have a lot of inventory. We need to maintain a higher buffer inventory than normally because of the lead times. Will that change during the year? Hopefully, it would gradually start changing. That would then start helping on the networking capital side. When it comes to prices and cost of the supply chain, we have seen some good development on memory prices. But then when it comes to logic and analog, we have not really seen that yet. So that all remains to be seen where the markets will take us.

David Mulholland: Thank you, Richard. We’ll take our next question from Peter Nielsen from ABG. Peter, please go ahead.