asymco

In June of last year I wrote a post titled “Does the phone market forgive failure?” It was written on the eve of Nokia’s Q2 2011 report highlighting the historic consequences of a dip into negative operating margins for a phone vendor.

I listed 13 phone vendors who were either merged, liquidated or acquired. There are no examples of vendors who recovered from a position of loss making.

I was prompted to follow-up by a note Charter Equity Research analyst Edward Snyder wrote illustrating the effect of negative operating margins on phone vendors. I took his illustration and expanded it with additional data.

Since my post in June last year Sony Ericsson and Motorola were acquired making the victims list total 14 companies, with Nokia, LG and RIM having joined the “endangered species list”. If the pattern repeats, then RIM and Nokia are in early phases of what promises to be an extended period of pain followed by an exit.

What the analysis does not answer is

Our agreement with Microsoft includes platform support payments from Microsoft to us as well as software royalty payments from us to Microsoft. In the first quarter 2012, we received a quarterly platform support payment of USD 250 million (approximately EUR 189 million). We have a competitive software royalty structure, which includes minimum software royalty commitments. Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars. The total amount of the platform support payments is expected to slightly exceed the total amount of the minimum software royalty commitments.

From Nokia’s Q1 2012 financial interim report

The figure of $250 million for Q1 is the same as the amount Nokia received for “platform support” in Q4 2011. This means Microsoft has paid $500 million over two quarters. During the same time frame Nokia shipped approximately three million Windows Phone devices. The average cost to Microsoft to acquire a Nokia Windows Phone user is therefore $167 per user. This is down from $250/user in the last quarter.[1]

If the royalty is equivalent to a license fee then the more interesting question is how and when will the royalty payments nearly match the platform support payments as expected. This might give us an estimate of what both parties are expecting from the relationship.

Nokia reported Q1 results following very closely the warning issued last week.

There were few surprises. There is much more detail in terms of regional performance which might be a better indicator of how the smartphone strategy is playing out. I plotted the data in three charts.

Regional Sales Value

A year ago Europe and China were nearly equally valuable as regions to Nokia (€2.1 billion and €1.9 billion, respectively). Even though sales fell across all regions, China fell so much that it has become the fourth in value and nearly the same value as Latin America (€577 million for China vs. €542 million for Latin America). This is a significant reversal for a very important market. The drop in value is a staggering 70%. Is there some clue as to what caused this?