After the flashy handsets and trendy new services displayed at the Nokia press conferece, the room two thirds emptied and up stepped ceo Simon Beresford-Wylie, doing his best not to sound too much "after the Lord Mayor's show".
Now, network infrastructure is a tough market at the moment, very much the ginger stepchild of the mobile world. And it doesn't sound much better when your ceo spends a lot of time talking about the benefits of stripping out costs, concentrating on deal quality and keeping the employees happy.
"Since February 2007 I would say our company has made fairly encouraging progress against a backdrop of a market that has got tougher," Beresford-Wylie said.
"I recall that we had a rough start but have shown good progress since then, with sequential improvements in the top line and operating margins in third and fourth quarters. Q4 was a 24% sequential improvement over the third quarter. Now this is still far from our goals but nevertheless is heading in the right direction. We closed 900 deals in Q2, 1900 deals in Q3 and 2,300 in Q4," Beresford -Wylie said.
The company made 4,200 headcount reductions against a target of 9,000. It has also left 270 buildings, and concluded all its supplier negotiations.
It is also moving its services business unit to be hubbed out of India. With India and China accounting for 70% of NSN radio volumes, clearly it's worth Nokia Siemens Networks turning its attention eastwards, and investing to do so.
The more so as NSN is clearly finding it tough finding deals of value elsewhere.
"The telco infrastructure market – it's tough out there. 2007 turned out to be a difficult year, with only very slight growth and much of that coming from services. And we don't see things getting easier any time soon," Beresford-Wylie said,
NSN expects the market to grow only very slightly this year, and there was a hint that if something bad happens that could even go into negative growth, although Beresford-Wylie said that at the moment NSN isn't updating its advice.
There was one better bit of news – the launch today of NSN's LTE radio network solution for core and radio networks. This multi mode base station is available in 2008 for WCDMA and HSPA, and in the second half of next year operators can plug in LTE with a software upgrade.
The multi-mode base station launch mirrored Ericsson's similar launch. Now all both manufacturers need is operators to buy them.
And it doesn't look like the established 3GPP progression path vendors are going to have it all their own way. The thing about LTE is that, being ODFM and MIMO based, it's very, very similar in its radio profile to mobile WiMax, and very, very different to WCDMA/HSPA. This means that those vendors that perhaps have not had such a great time of it in 3 and 3.5G, but have developed mobile WiMax solutions, reckon they have a strong play in WiMax.
One of those is Motorola, whose director of LTE market development, Kieren Ashlee, said, "We think we will be a strong [LTE] presence. Operators like the way we are coming at this market, and with our WiMax experience we have a strong time to market advantage."
Ashlee said that Motorola was taking a service-centric approach to LTE, instead of merely talking about speed and data rates. So do operators really need to be told the advantages of greater data rates – such as the ability to stream high definition video or achieve very low latency for multiplayer gaming?
"I think they need to see the future services that drive their own customers," Ashlee said. Ashlee said that he thought that LTE at re-farmed 900 and 1800MHz frequencies would also offer great potential for some mobile operators to bypass 3G all together.
His colleague, Andy McKinnon, principal for WiMax in EMEA, said that building WiMax networks had given Motorola "invaluable" experience in the planning and deployment of OFDM networks. As the radios are 80% the same, he said, that gave Motorla a clear advantage when it came to the building of LTE networks.
As WiMax and LTE will operate at different frequencies, and in FDD and TDD modes respectively, McKinnon said that we would eventually see a mix of LTE and WiMax coverage, as operators drop in different solutions according to capacity requirements, coverage and the environment.
Of course that's a vision that suits Motorola, playing as it does in all the areas, and gives it a possible "in" to a market they have struggled in (GSM/3GPP progression path). Mind you, the company said the same thing about HSPA, with little success. But it will hope that the move to a new type of radio access will offer a true inflexion point, and a possible re-entry point to the market.
Yesterday, an article in the Washington Post claimed that Motorola has been talking to Nortel about combining the companies' wireless units.
Any merger with Nortel, which has a WiMax business but of course no cellular wireless 3G business since it divested to Alcatel-Lucent, would only strengthen the company's WiMax position, while adding Motorola's other wireless technology to Nortel.