Pinpointing the Elop Effect - 3 Pictures from Nokia Financial Data All Agree it was February 2011

There are some who are trying to write revisionist history about Nokia now, as they head to their shareholder meeting about the handset unit sale. I want to post these three pictures from Nokia results, to show just very clearly, yes there is obviously an Elop Effect, all Nokia data totally agree that in the smartphone unit there was clear unit sales growth before Elop Effect, which turns into decline. There was clear revenue growth before Elop Effect, which collapsed. And there were strong profits before Elop Effect which all vanished turning into perennial losses. Nokia the company did not die out of becoming a dinosaur. Nokia was killed by an assassin - a paid assassin, the CEO who got a 25 million dollar bonus for destroying the smartphone unit. That is why Elop was worst CEO of any company in Fortune 500 history. Here are the pictures

Nokia Smartphone Unit Sales Before and After Elop Effect



This picture may be freely shared

Nokia Smartphone Revenues Before and After Elop Effect



This picture may be freely shared

Nokia Profits at Smartphone Unit  Before Elop Effect and Losses After



This picture may be freely shared

There is total agreement in those pictures. Nokia smartphone unit was VERY healthy, growing unit sales, growing revenues and generating increasing (and Nokia record-setting) profits. Those all were destroyed exactly in Q1 of 2011, ie February 2011, with the Elop Effect. That is the truth, people.. Lets not rewrite history now. If you want to read the full story of what happened at Nokia and how the above performance was possible, read this: Nokia Requiem. And if you want to know how Elop could have gotten such a bizarre 'assassination bonus' into his contract, this is my speculation of how it happened. And for those who think that Nokia was in trouble before Elop, he had a hopeless mission - here is the comparison of previous CEO Kallasvuo vs Elop. Yes, Nokia had problems before Elop came in - totally fixable problems and the smartphone unit was not the sick puppy at Nokia at the time. Elop decided to destroy the smartphone unit, because it was the easy way for him to collect 25 million dollars.

PS if you are curious why is there such a strong peak in Q4 of 2011, that was driven by the launch of Nokia's only MeeGo based handset, the N9, Nokia's flagship smartphone of 2011, plus obviously Christmas seasonal sales peak (which is almost non-existent a year later when Christmas sales were driven by new Windows Phone 8 based Lumia flagship phones). It is not a peak driven by Lumia and Windows Phone (which launched in small numbers in Q4). You can see that Lumia did not help decline Nokia smartphone unit sales, or revenues, or help turn loss-making into profits, until the "Lumia bottom" was hit about Q1 of 2013. 

Comments

[don_afrim]

I think the biggest reason why Elop killed Nokia is because the Jesuits of the Vatican want to destroy Europe just like they are destroying America. You can claim conspiracy, illuminati all you want but its true (look up World Bank whistle-blower Karen Hudes and you'll see what I'm talking about).

They are planning on giving China the next Superpower Status and are moving all major corporations there which they have been doing for the past 30-40years. They will use all kinds of reasons why its better bla bla and noone with a functioning brain sees through their scam. Nokia was the last standing high tech company of Europe and a major one on top of that. They needed it destroyed and did not want to pay $100billion to buy it out.

Now what happened next after Nokia lost all that business? SAMSUNG got it all for free! Now you may claim well but Samsung is not China. Guess what? The Jesuits control Korea as well. Anyway at some point China will take ALL Asia in a future Asian Union setup just like the Jesuits did with the European ((SOVIET)) Union and the North American Union is already in place ready to be implemented after the next civil war which has already been planned and is well under way.

If you don't believe it and comfortably claim conspiracy from your couch well then move your GMO-filled fat ass and look it up.

Tomi I challenge you to research my claims and remember my post you will see it become reality within the next few years!

[e_lm_70]

"Elop decided to destroy the smartphone unit, because it was the easy way for him to collect 25 million dollars." Who give Elop this incredible working contract. With a huge bonus for destroy the core business of the company that he was supposed to lead as CEO ?
You focus too much on the puppet that put the face in public, and you forget who is behind with the controlling power : The 3 mayor American Funds that dictate the end of Nokia owning just bit more then 15% of the company.

[Jippu]

Why is that line on Q4 2010 if the memo / strategy launch was in Feb 2011, i.e. Q1 2011?

[Giacomo Di Giacomo]

@Another exnokian
The graphs are made by joining points with straight lines. The first point lower than the previous one is that corresponding to Q1/2011, i. e. 31 March 2011, that is the first one after the Burning Platforms memo.

[Jimmy]

Now watch the madness intensify as Nokia (Microsoft's newly wedded wife) is releasing a phablet (Lumia 1520) and a Windows RT tablet (Lumia 2520).

One day Microsoft will not have any more money to bleed. I hope it'll happen within my lifetime.

@move on with your life
Tomi bashes whatever he fancies, it is none of your business. Besides, Microsoft is a scum company deserving every ounce of hatred. If you don't like what you read, close your browser and don't visit this site again.

[Giacomo Di Giacomo]

@Baron95
You are making one of Tomi's points, that is, that Nokia should have gone partly Android. If anybody here wishes to imply that Nokia, following any path that was different from going fully Windows Phone, could have done any worse than it actually did starting Q2/2011, please state it openly.

[Ben]

@ Baron95
Why do you spread such FUD? It's people like you why Tomi has to rehash the same argument again and again. You refuse to acknowledge the truth and argue against it. Are you a MS employee or shill? What's the real story here?

It's obvious that Nokia could not move quite as fast as Google/Samsung. But they didn't have to. They had other strengths and that's why they managed to sell over 100 million smartphones in 2010. And that happened to be more than Samsung and Apple combined.

[Earendil Star]

Regarding speed, no company is as slow as MS. Nokia (pre THTRH Flop) was lightning fast in comparison.
MS' only advantage is it's monopolist grip on the PC and enterprise market and the pile of cash it sits on.

Just think mobile: they started 10+ years ago, even with tablets.
They got nowhere with WM, max 10% market share. Tablets 0% market share.
After Apple came out with the iPhone, Baldmer was scoffing at the attempt and failed to react.
Apple also comes out with the iPad.
A couple of years later, MS realizes that -maybe- being left out from mobile could be a death blow.
They decide they want to take the "Apple" path (closed app ecosystem) and ditch their Windows cash cow imposing a shitty ad-driven tile interface, trying to stuff it down everyone's throat to force developer adoption.
Windows 8, the schizoid (P)OS, is such a failure, that for the first time in history it is offered at heavily discounted prices to promote its adoption.

As usual, they are incapable of taking the fair route, and proceed with a bribed stealth acquisition of Nokia in 2010. Their undercover agent is the moronic THTRH Flop. Plan is to transition Nokia's 30% market share to WP Lumias, but the poorly executed plan badly fails and produces a meager 3% share, while MS is now forced to buy Nokia, albeit at a ridiculous price, to avoid its collapse.

Meanwhile, they also come out with this crazy and confusing Windows RT idea, that plummets like a rock, hard hitting the Surface. Tablet sales still negligible.

Years after WP launch, marred by the WP7 stop-gap fiasco that was labelled by the usual MS trolls writing on this blog as fantastic (only now they admit it was a (P)OS), they have yet to figure out that the correct strategy is to have the phone OS also on tablets, and a separate OS only on desktops. Apparently Windows RT and WP will converge sometime in 2015. LOL.

So, anyone repeating this idiotic meme that Nokia was uncapable of producing good software, while MS was, please shut up, close your fairy books and consider reality.

[eduardo]

Nokia releases 6 new devices:

http://bgr.com/2013/10/22/nokia-lumia-1520-lumia-2520-release-date/

[hduty]

Baron95 is simply a chimpanzee in an Uncle Sam outfit beating his chest. That explains his constant and repetitive shrieking of how the US is the center of the smartphone universe, all while deliberately avoiding the [inconvenient] fact that e.g. ARM is European.

As such, don't expect him to post here anymore the moment a new OS/platform emerges that isn't US-based.

[peter]

Tomi's charting is precise.
I was a proud owner of nokia n8 in USA till the Elop declared the death of Nokia Symbian ^3. Nokia n8 beated iphone 4 in almost every aspect at the time it was launched. Nokia captured more market share with nokia n8 and nokia E8 in smartphone area.

The Elop stabbed nokia in the back when it quickly captured back its market share. Nokia's loyal consumers and distributor simply couldn't argue with apple fans any more: "your CEO claimed your n8/e8 is obsolete, period".

now we know the Elop was executing Jorma Ollila's plan (the traitor's plan).

Only question left is why Finnish people is so dumb in arresting Jorma and its cronies ?

[Earendil Star]

Many are concentrating on the precise pinpointing of the decline between Q4 2010 and Q1 2011. Fantasizing that this disproves Tomi's accurate description of Nokia's fate, doomed by THTRH Elop.

Well, it's true that orders came before THTRH Flop's announcements. Yet who is saying this tends to forget that customers often get insider information that allows to understand what's happening within a company. Employees speak and they say what they see happening. Plus, many simply understood only too well what was happening behind the scenes: what was a Mr NoOne in Mobile doing at Nokia's helm? His only qualification being that he came from MS? Not too difficult to understand.

So one possible explanation is simply that operators knew what was brewing and anticipated that Symbian was doomed. Plus, being Nokia now MS, they simply decided that doing business with MS was not like doing it with Nokia before. Why shift from a reliable partner to an unreliable bully?

Yet, all of this is really irrelevant. What actually matters is what happens from that moment onwards. A rapid, steady, unstoppable decline. This means that whatever errors were made in early 2011 were just compounded by what was done thereafter. Who was at the helm during the past two years? MS. Not OPK. Not AV. No European. Just an American Flop.

A pure American Flop.

[Confused Star]

Tomi, will you kick and ban Windows95 already? His trolling was funny for a while, but nowadays he adds nothing but noise to the discussion. I'm already skipping all of his comments without reading.

[winter]

@LeebBase
The horse is dead, but the butcher still alive. And looking for more horses to slaughter.

[E.Casais]

"For some reason this one generates hundreds of thousands of words here."

Because it is the firm that turned the mobile phone industry into a truly international, mass-market phenomenon.

Palm and RIM were small players devoted to very specific business-orientated demographics. Ericsson and Motorola were also-ran, Samsung only a late-comer.

[WonTheLottery]

@Ben
You have to take the comments of baron95 & LeeBase with a very large pinch of salt, they were advocates of Elop's Windows Phone strategy, they actually thought such a ridiculous strategy had a chance of working :-) Laughable isn't it? If you've got some time to spare read more of their 'analysis', it's all pretty funny.

You are right about NOKIA's sales in 2010, their volumes were actually up 48% YoY over 2009. baron95 wants to talk about contraction in the UK market but he fails to mention NOKIA's substantial growth in China, now by far the largest smartphone market on the planet. He doesn't want to talk about enormous China, he wants to talk about tiddly little UK because that suits his narrative. NOKIA's gross margin was healthier then than at any time since Elop's intervention which belies baron95's story about stacking them high and selling them cheap too.

baron95 also likes to talk about RIM. Prior to BB10 RIM had never made a smartphone, just well put together J2ME feature phones in conjunction with some useful services. You could buy a Series 40 J2ME feature phone for a fraction of the price of a BlackBerry. It was the services that were RIM's selling point not the phones. Until a few years ago lots of teenagers in the UK had BlackBerrys because BBM was a fraction of the price of SMS. Now there's WhatsApp, Kik, Viber, etc.. none of the kids have BlackBerrys anymore.

Notice how LeeBase said 'Qt never became the savior of Meego'? He obviously doesn't realise Qt Creator was still in beta when Elop pulled the plug on it. It would be hard for Qt to save Meego in those circumstances don't you think? Shhh... don't tell LeeBase, he thinks he's being clever ;-)

I could go on but you get the gig, right ;-)

In the light of the Prism scandal if Canonical or Jolla release a truly, completely open source OS (and let's not pretend that Android is) it could be a very big deal.

Members of the EU are positively fuming about being spied on by an 'ally'. The monitoring of Angela Merkel's mobile phone conversations by the US may serve to put Microsoft's rape and murder of NOKIA in sharp focus.

European politicians are already stating US cloud services should not be used, hopefully they'll connect the dots and realise closed source operating systems from the US shouldn't be used either.

We're seeing similar outrage in Brazil for the same reason. The BRIC countries are even considering building their own internet infrastructure in order to bypass the USA.

There's a huge opportunity for ethical open source players right now.

[E.Casais]

@Baron95

You keep shifting the focus of the discussion.

The question was "why is Nokia being discussed so much?" Because Nokia, for 15 years, was the most important player in mobile phones. It is still nr. 2. If there is a company that made mobile popular, affordable, relevant, opened up new markets for mobile, and defined what mobile phones looked like and operated, it is the one.

Now to some of your other arguments:

"what customers wanted were cheap devices"

That is exactly what people needed and wanted -- you have probably not experienced the prices of 1G and early 2G phones. Nokia made them finally affordable. This is exactly what most people still need and want worldwide -- otherwise we would not be discussing those "under $100 smartphones" so much.

"with operator branded and controlled experiences"

Wrong. Nokia was decidedly against it. Read Tomi's past articles on that: the reluctance of Nokia to cripple its devices for US operators' whims cost it the US market.

"They thought that low BOM was an advantage"

Low BOM is _always_ an advantage. Think margins. Your favorite firm, Apple, is well aware of this and orders massive amounts of components in advance to benefit from bulk price discounts and reduce its BOM. What is not an advantage is skimping on quality, or on storage/processing power (the latter one being a not uncommon sin at Nokia).

"They thought that ignoring the US, Korean and Japanese market was smart"

Get informed. Nokia made several attempts at cracking the US market -- but failed. They made an attempt in Japan, but this was too closed (Ericsson and Motorola tried as well, and exited quickly). None of them ever cracked the South Korean market. All markets that were tightly operator-controlled. Sure, Apple managed to enter those markets successfully -- it took it years, and contrarily to Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola though, it did not have to view them as customers for its network gear.

"They though that having their own manufacturing plants was an advantage"

And it is (again: margins for large volumes). Point 1: Nokia also relied a lot on subcontracting -- much manufacturing was not done in its own plants (firms like Elcoteq, Solectron, Flextronics, Electrobit depended a lot on Nokia orders -- some of them are now bankrupt). Point 2: I suggest you dig into Apple business model, as analysed at Asymco. Apple has a huge investment in equipment and machinery -- how come since it does not have plants? Well, it buys the machines used by Foxconn to produce its devices. Indeed, owning the physical means of production _is_ a genuine advantage when producing large volumes, but of course you do not know and do not care about industrial economics.

"a temporary flash in volumes of cheap phones"

15 years is _temporary_? Billions of devices sold is a _flash_? I have in front of me the catalog of a large consumer electronics retailer from 2005 advertising those once great offers. A 6230i (once a Nokia best seller) cost then the equivalent of $430 (unlocked). This was a _cheap_ phone? For a comparison, the Motorola V980 was then $470, and a SonyEricsson K300i a paltry $155.

"Nokia was pretty much wrong on everything"

Except for that long period during which Nokia was doing everything right. The harder they fall. The wheel of fortune. Cleverness and hubris. Let us come back in 9 years and see how your current heroes are doing.

Till then, please tone down your jingoism, try to stick to facts, and above all keep a sense of proportions.

[zlutor]

@Baron95: "They though operator billing was an advantage, but it was a liability." - no, it was absolutely right approach.
It is really convenient way of payment for all parties being involved in...

Please, consider people living outside of USA and the developed world - yes, there are some, you know. Having bank account is not always an option and quite large portion of people just simply do not want to use their cards for paying on Internet, still...

[R]

The Microsoft boosters are prematurely preaching the failures of Firefox OS, Jolla, and Tizen. They're still being developed. So they are not out, yet. That's normal and expected, because it takes time for a company to make a new product line. It takes less time for a product to be refined, once the production has started.

I mean, look at iPhone. Its development started in 2005, and it was boosted by earlier investments in manufacturing partnerships from the iPod and UI concepts from what would become the iPad. (Yes, the iPad was under development before the iPhone.) Even with all Apple's resources, it took until 2007 before the iPhone was released, and then they've been iterating every year.

Look at Android. It started further behind, and was in development since 2003. Nobody is saying it's a failure, even though there were no Android phones until 2008.

I don't know how long Windows Phone took to develop. But even now, 3 years after the 2010 release of Windows Phone 7, partners such as Nokia are complaining about how slowly Microsoft is iterating on it.

Firefox OS was really started in 2011, and already in 2013 the first Firefox OS phones are out. From my perspective, that's a really amazing speed of development. They're currently low-end phones, which may explain why nobody is excited about them, but they exist and investment continues.

Jolla and Tizen are bigger question marks. Jolla started in 2011, and they're probably going to release their phone in 2014. Less than 3 years seems like a really short time to start new company, develop supplier relations from scratch, and release such a high-tech product. I'm less optimistic about Tizen. Tizen looks like the sort of bureaucratic mess that MeeGo was, and LiMo and Moblin before them. But if Samsung's bosses are really committed to it, then I'm sure Tizen can at least come into the marketplace.

[Winter]

@Leebase If FirefoxOS can deliver most of Android's functionality at half the price, say below $40, a handset, it might clean out the lower billion customers. But only if Android cannot get to that price point fast enough. The other route is to deliver a complete personal computer platform with wireless periferals and screen. That could be delivered over Android/Chrome and more beefy processors.