Nordic markets were up today to end a volatile week. 4th president of Egypt Hosni Mubarak finally yielded to pressure and resigned. Global markets took this positively. Lenghty enough time has passed from the first calls from western countries to try to pressure China into a RMB revulation and now they have been starting to be ready for that as the local press is subtly pointing the benefits of a stronger Yuan to Chinese people. Recent demands from FED Chairman Bernanke for just that may push back the action though.
Nokia's Capital Markets day signalled a potential shift of course as the company is planning a broad strategic partnership with Microsoft. The two companies plan to create " a new global mobile ecosystem". Nokia is to adopt Windows Phone as its principal smartphone strategy. The companies plan to collaborate on marketing strategies and to have a shared development road map. First Windows 7 Nokia phone is already under development. Nokia will be reorganized into Smart Devices and Mobile Phones divisions.
No news were delivered on MeeGo besides comments that one product is to reach the market this year and the OS to become an open source platform. Intel defended it later on today. Symbian continues to be the main OS before the Microsoft negotiations have been completed, automatically meaning the next couple of years will be miserable as confidence will be shattered concerning the devices coming support among other things. Alberto Torres, who has been responsible for MeeGo and mobile solutions is the only immediate casualty from the Board. Obviously plenty of developers of MeeGo and Symbian were ruined.
The markets were devastated of the union of the two behemoths, particularly wondering what exactly is Nokia getting out of this. Some analysts went as far as to say that this was new CEO Elop's plan all along, to make Nokia Microsoft's milking cow. Billions were wiped out of the market value of Nokia as the stock slumped near its finance crisis lows. There were no announcements of R&D cuts but those will follow and may be accompanied with a small bounce back in the stock as Finnish authorities have already been warned of a structural change the likes of which the country is yet to see in new technologies sector. QT-developer firms Ixonos and Digia slumped as well.
The steel company SSAB reported disappointing quarterly numbers. Boliden matched expectations. BioGaia did well as more and more products containing licensed probiotics (live bacteria) from BioGaia are launched. While same goes with Omega 3 products, Pronova BioPharma fared worse after its quarterly report.
No comments:
Post a Comment