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Back of Napkin

Nokia Oyj NOK

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The bet you're really making is that Nokia's newer gear, the optical and internet-routing boxes that wire AI data centers together, grows fast enough to outrun its old, shrinking cell-tower radio business. You are also betting the money it collects from patents, which nearly every phone maker on earth pays it, keeps flowing, and that after a decade of cutting costs the cutting finally stops. Right now the new part is racing: last quarter its network gear sold 12% more, and sales to AI and cloud customers doubled, while the actual reported profit was near zero because it is still paying to shrink. You pay about 21 times what it is expected to earn a couple of years out, and 68 times last year's gutted profit, the high end of what Nokia has fetched in its profitable years over the last decade.

Key data

Price$10.04
52-week range$4.48 – $17.45
P/E, trailing / 2028E68x / 21x
EV/EBITDA, TTM17.8x

NOK · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$2$6$9$13$16 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Nokia makes the physical equipment that carries phone calls and internet traffic, in three big pieces. Mobile Infrastructure, the radios and base stations bolted to cell towers and sold to carriers like T-Mobile and Deutsche Telekom, is the largest and most price-pressured, fighting Ericsson, Samsung, and a barred-from-the-West Huawei. Network Infrastructure, the optical and IP routing boxes that move data between and inside data centers, is the smaller, faster part, the one the Infinera acquisition bulked up. And Nokia Technologies, a patent library so deep that almost every smartphone maker writes Nokia a check to use it, a high-margin annuity that lands lumpy and often catches up in the fourth quarter. The real moat lives in that last box and in the engineering scale a 5G radio demands, a moat that has not stopped the top line from shrinking for four straight years. Nokia spends about a quarter of every euro of sales on research.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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