I felt a bit guilty that Jungner took up so much attention on our board.
I’ll make up for it on behalf of myself and @Rosteri with a brief status update.
Nokia’s stock price has been quite the rollercoaster lately. If you checked the price in the morning, it might have swung over 5% in the other direction by the evening. We came down sharply from nearly 15 euros in June, and now we are hovering around 8.8 euros. In other words, more than 40% has melted away from the peaks, even though the stock is still clearly in the green year-to-date.
However, the fundamental story has not collapsed—quite the contrary. Q2 orders from AI and cloud customers were a staggering 2.8 billion euros, Optical Networks is growing fast, and Nokia raised the upper end of its 2026 earnings guidance. The growth of AI data centers is clearly Nokia’s most important new driver; that has been obvious for a long time.
But here comes the small “but”: an order is not yet revenue, and revenue is not yet profit. The market was quick to price in the AI story at a furious pace, and now investors are trying to gauge how quickly that 2.8 billion order pot will actually show up in the bottom line and cash flow. By the way, that pot is surely even bigger by now…
The market seems to re-decide every other day whether Nokia is the next winner in AI infrastructure or if the hype went a little too far. I follow AI development for a living, and I still maintain that we are only at the beginning.
Analyst views are also exceptionally divided. I think Inderes could already be fitted for a dunce cap, as Inderes believes profit growth has already been priced into the stock front-loaded. They are missing the big picture here. Inderes is too busy analyzing small companies (my own opinion).
JPMorgan is in a league of its own with a 21-dollar price target and believes the market is underestimating Nokia’s AI potential. I agree with that latter comment. An 18-euro share price might take a couple of years to reach.
I see the situation as twofold.
Bull-case: Demand for AI data center network infrastructure continues to grow strongly, a 3+ billion order book begins to turn into revenue quickly, and margins improve. A year from now, under €9 will look cheap.
Bear-case: AI orders turn into cash slower than expected, margins do not develop, and the traditional network equipment business remains weak. In that case, the current €8–9 might not be a bargain price at all.
One cannot forget that Nokia is aggressively scaling down its operations in China, which may be sensible in the long run but causes costs in the short term.
Regardless, this is a story not worth missing at these prices.