• Nokia Oyj’s Q1 2024 results showed a 26% decrease in net sales and a decrease in operating margins from Network Infrastructure.
  • Nokia Technologies saw a doubling of net sales, benefiting from licensing deals and aiming to raise annual net sales to EUR 1.4-1.5 billion.
  • Mobile Networks experienced a nearly 40% decrease in net sales, with speculation that telecom firms will prioritize debt repayment over equipment spending.


On a call with reporters today, Nokia said it will cut ~11,500 jobs and end up with a workforce of approximately 74,500 employees at the end of 2026.  Like Ericsson, it has responded to the global telecom market contraction by announcing a fresh wave of job cuts. Having already eliminated 16,000 jobs since 2016 (the year of that Alcatel-Lucent acquisition), Nokia last year said up to 14,000 jobs would disappear, and no fewer than 9,000, by the end of 2026. The aim is to save between €800 million ($854 million) and €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) in annual expenses.  That newest layoff round follows Ericsson’s announcement that it will lay off ~1,200 employees in Sweden as part of cost-cutting measures announced earlier this year as telco customers reduce their spending on 5G network equipment.

“We are progressing toward this target and currently looking at somewhere around the midpoint of that range,” Lundmark said when asked by Light Reading if there is now more certainty about the ultimate size of the company at the end of the program. “That will then finally depend on the development of the market situation.”

North American customers that previously gorged on supplies have seen little need in the last year to replenish inventory. The pace of a 5G rollout in India has dramatically slowed. Denied the opportunity to consolidate, European telcos still underinvest in 5G, complain vendors. After managing a €137 million ($146 million) mobile operating profit for the first quarter of 2023, Nokia slid a year later to a €42 million ($45 million) loss.

Nokia’s network infrastructure business group – including fixed residential, optical and Internet Protocol activities – sales were down 26%, to less than €1.7 billion ($1.8 billion). An engine of sales growth during Lundmark’s first years in charge, it registered a 42% fall in operating income, to €82 million ($88 million). At cloud and network services, meanwhile, revenues dropped 14%, to €652 million ($696 million), and losses widened 35%, to €27 million ($29 million).

“We have said that we are continuously doing active portfolio management – you have seen some our recent moves that we did last year,” Lundmark said. Disposals included the €185 million ($198 million) sale of a device management business to Canada’s Lumine Group and the earlier transfer of about 350 employees working on cloud platforms to IBM-owned Red Hat.

“We are pleased with the strategy that we have in place in mobile networks,” said Lundmark. “We have a strong value proposition there, we have increased our market share in recent years, and we have a good strategy to deliver value to our shareholders,” he added.

After Intel’s failure to deliver 10-nanometer microprocessors, Nokia resorted to field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and its competitiveness suffered. But Nokia’s Mobile Networks boss Tommi Uitto subsequently introduced the well-regarded Broadcom and Marvell Technology as chip suppliers alongside Intel, and the FPGAs have now been replaced. Outside China and the U.S., Nokia’s market share has recently grown, say independent analysts.

In mobile, the full-year outlook remains relatively bleak, even if the second half brings some improvement. “The market has been really, really weak, which is not a Nokia issue,” said Lundmark, in his detailed answer to that question about a sale of mobile assets. “It is an industry issue.  Ithas to be a matter of time before operators again will have to start investing, and, once that happens, we will be in a strong position,” he concluded.