Nokia broadcasts a 600 million buyback: the inventory soars on the inventory market | EUROtoday

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A reasonably grey 2023, for Nokia. The Finnish telecommunications gear group ended the yr with web revenue down 84% year-on-year to 679 million euros. The firm itself, as soon as the undisputed chief within the cell phone market, introduced this in a word. In the identical word, Nokia expects a “still difficult” context within the first half of 2024, the place nonetheless it expects “positive signals” for community infrastructure orders. . The Finnish large recorded an 11% drop in turnover final yr to 22.26 billion euros and estimates that the primary quarter will nonetheless be “complicated”.

The firm itself introduced that it’ll launch a two-year, €600 million ($653 million) share repurchase plan this quarter. The announcement kicked off a rally within the inventory, with shares rising by 7% within the first hours of buying and selling.

“In 2023 we have seen a significant shift in customer behavior impacting our industry, driven by the macroeconomic environment and high interest rates coupled with customer inventory digestion,” stated Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark .

Inventory digestion refers to clients, resembling telecommunications networks, utilizing gear they’ve already bought, quite than buying new gear. Lundmark stated the difficult setting of 2023 will proceed this yr. And the corporate expects comparable working revenue to achieve between 2.3 and a couple of.9 billion euros in 2024. Analysts count on working revenue to be round 2.4 billion euros in 2024.

Nokia has been damage by telecom operators’ cuts in spending on networks. India, which has invested closely in next-generation cell networks over the previous two years, is beginning to decelerate. And cell networks, Nokia’s largest division when it comes to income, noticed gross sales fall 17% year-on-year to 2.5 billion euros within the fourth quarter.