The Wall Street Journal - Nokia Is in Position for Handset Gains
蘋 果在世界各地點燃專利戰火，專利權成了各大科技廠商的保衛武器與賺錢利器。過去20年，諾基亞累積了超越30,000項專利，以及將近10,000個擁有 專利保護的創新，包括無線科技以及材料技術。根據之前分析師預估，諾基亞擁有的專利價值大約在50～130億美元之間。
不過，拜蘋果與三星專利官司之賜，諾基亞的專利價值也隨之水漲船高，因為在法庭上，蘋果的辯護律師以一款諾基亞製造的全新Windows Phone，證明手機廠商可以製造出與蘋果iPhone有明顯區隔的智慧型手機。當天諾基亞的股價瞬間大漲7.7％。
過去一年，諾基亞市值縮水了將近三分之一，今年7月中旬諾基亞公布第二季財報仍呈現虧損，股價在每股2.01美元低檔徘徊，但蘋果與三星的官司，挽救了諾基亞的股價，蘋果贏得官司之後，諾基亞股價推升至2.68美元。
自去年開始，諾基亞與蘋果之間已達成多項專利和解。蘋果同意一次支付所有的費用，未來每年持續支付授權金。今年5月，諾基亞分別在美國與德國，向宏達電、黑莓機製造商RIM以及Viewsonic提出專利訴訟。
Nokia's Bad Call On Smartphones
諾基亞何以折戟智能手機市場？
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多年前﹐原諾基亞(Nokia Corp.)首席設計師諾沃(Frank Nuovo)向無線運營商和投資者做報告﹐猜想移動互聯網的未來。
諾基亞首席執行長史蒂芬﹒埃洛普(Stephen Elop)近日接受《華爾街日報》專訪。他談論了諾基亞在創新、管理方面的努力，以及如何通過艱難的轉型力求讓公司走出困境。
諾沃一邊瀏覽著他昔日的幻燈片﹐一邊說：天哪﹐我們完全抓住了要害。
消費者從未看到這兩款產品。諾基亞斥巨資用於研發﹐卻浪費了把創新引入市場的機會。上述兩款產品正是這種企業文化的犧牲品。
諾基亞在90年代引領了無線革命﹐並下定決心要把世界帶進智能手機時代。現在智能手機時代已經到來﹐諾基亞卻還在為推出有競爭力的產品而忙得不亦樂乎﹐而此時該公司的股價已大幅下跌﹐成千上萬的員工丟掉了飯碗。
今 年諾基亞結束了連續14年成為世界最大手機生產商的歷史。競爭對手三星電子(Samsung Electronics Co.)搶過頭把交椅﹐生產更廉價手機的公司也在分食諾基亞的市場。IDC提供的市場數據顯示﹐一季度諾基亞在手機市場的份額已經從去年同期的27%下降 到21%。其最高份額是在2007年第四季度﹐當時達到了40.4%。
儘管過去10年該公司投資400億美元用於研發──這一數額接近蘋果同一時期研發投入的四倍﹐諾基亞仍然在市場上節節敗退。而且諾基亞明顯是看到了它所主導的行業的發展方向。然而﹐研發工作因為內部不和而碎片化﹐並且跟生產銷售手機的實際運營活動脫節。
大 規模的投入並沒有帶來大受歡迎的終端或軟件﹐而是給諾基亞留下了至少兩款被拋棄的操作系統和一大堆專利。據分析師現在估計﹐這些專利的價值在60億美元左 右﹐構成了整個公司價值的主要部分。首席執行長埃洛普(Stephen Elop)準備從這些“傳家寶”裡面拿出更多東西賣掉﹐讓公司支撐到能夠扭轉自身命運的時刻。
埃洛普在最近接受的一次採訪中說﹐要是諾基亞的創新當初落實在產品上面﹐諾基亞就不是現在這個樣子了。
在危機四伏的手機市場迷失方向的公司不只諾基亞一家。Research In Motion Ltd.（簡稱RIM）曾因電子郵件終端黑莓(BlackBerry)而佔據霸主地位﹐但它也沒有能夠拿出一款與iPhone一較高下的產品。
受此影響﹐RIM的市值在過去五年縮水約90%﹐其CEO正在努力讓投資者相信該公司並沒有陷入“死亡螺旋”。
RIM的問題是缺乏合適的產品﹐而諾基亞實際上是開發出了今天消費者瘋狂搶購的幾類終端﹐只是沒有把這些終端引入市場。就在iPhone顛覆市場的時候﹐諾基亞把重心從智能手機移回到基本款手機上面﹐犯下了戰略錯誤。
原諾基亞首席設計師諾沃說﹐蘋果在這一概念上佔得先機時﹐我感覺非常心痛﹔每當別人說iPhone作為一個概念和一款硬件產品是獨一無二的﹐我都感到難過。
Dan Krauss for The Wall Street Journal
原諾基亞首席設計師諾沃稱﹐諾基亞當年的原型機擁有iPhone的某些特色和功能。
埃 洛普上任不久後﹐就停止了諾基亞自有智能手機軟件的研發﹐他說該公司將使用微軟(Microsoft Corp.)的Windows移動操作系統。埃洛普說﹐這樣他就能夠在不足一年之內推出一個新的手機系列與iPhone競爭﹐比諾基亞堅持使用自己的軟件 推出產品的速度要快得多。
諾基亞推出的Windows手機銷售情況並不好。該公司尚未公佈銷售數據﹐但今年4月曾說初期銷售情況喜憂參半 ﹐兩個月後又說競爭比他們預期的更激烈。埃洛普被迫在6月中旬宣佈諾基亞再裁員1萬人並削減成本17億美元﹐裁員和成本削減主要將針對研發部門。週日﹐諾 基亞將在美國銷售的Windows手機降價一半﹐至50美元。
諾基亞長期以來一直能夠成功適應巨大的市場變化。該公司創立於1865年﹐最初是一家木材廠﹐後來逐漸將業務多樣化﹐進入發電和塑料產品領域。
上世紀80年代末﹐蘇聯的解體和歐洲的衰退造成諾基亞各類產品的需求大幅下滑﹐公司陷入危機。1992年﹐曾為花旗銀行(Citibank)銀行家的奧利拉(Jorma Ollila)接任首席執行長一職﹐將諾基亞的業務重點放到手機上。
諾基亞的工廠最終出現在從德國到中國的諸多國家﹐諾基亞的物流環節運轉得非常順暢﹐以致於它能夠比世界上任何其他製造商都更快地滿足全球消費者的手機需求。諾基亞的利潤大幅上升﹐該公司股價也隨之飆升﹐2000年諾基亞的市值最高曾達到3,030億歐元。
高管們說﹐奧利拉和其他高層管理人員在芬蘭成了明星﹐他們出去用餐時常常要用包間。
早在當年﹐奧利拉即開始為諾基亞的下一階段改造打下基礎。諾基亞的高管們曾預測﹐2000年前﹐生產僅具有電話功能的手機將難以繼續盈利。於是﹐諾基亞開始斥資數十億美元研發手機電子郵件、觸控屏和更快速的無線網絡。
1996年﹐該公司發佈了其首款智能手機“諾基亞9000”﹐並稱它是首款能夠收發電子郵件、發傳真和上網的手機。這款手機重量略低於一磅。
奧利拉說﹐我們對手機行業的發展曾有著準確的預見。2006年﹐他辭去首席執行長一職﹐今年5月辭去了董事長一職。他說﹐我們的眼光超前了約五年。
“諾基亞9000”又被稱為“Communicator”﹐曾在影片《聖人》(The Saint)中亮過相﹐在某些企業用戶中獲得了很大的關注﹐但從未征服過普通大眾。
2004 年底﹐美國製造商摩托羅拉(Motorola)憑藉其輕薄的Razr掀蓋式手機在世界上一炮打響。諾基亞遭到了投資者的批評。他們說﹐在競爭對手侵蝕其頗 為賺錢的業務、向全球社會經濟地位不斷提高的用戶銷售昂貴的“傻瓜”手機時﹐諾基亞卻在高端智能手機上花費了太多的精力。
2006年諾基亞前首席財務長康培凱(Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo)接替奧利拉擔任首席執行長﹐之後他將諾基亞的智能手機和功能手機業務合二為一。該公司數位前高管說﹐結果就造成更為盈利的功能手機業務開始左右整體業務的發展。
諾基亞2004年設立了一個為智能手機創建多媒體服務的集團。該集團成員帕薩寧(Jari Pasanen)說﹐諾基亞的側重點倒退回去了﹐它走向了傳統手機。帕薩寧目前是芬蘭的一名風險投資家。
諾基亞智能手機的面市太超前了﹐當時消費者和無線網絡還沒有做好接納智能手機的準備。此外﹐當iPhone出現時﹐諾基亞沒有認識到它所帶來的威脅。
Dan Krauss for The Wall Street Journal
諾沃當年設計的產品
然而﹐消費者對iPhone愛不釋手。到2008年時﹐諾基亞高管們已經意識到﹐要與蘋果美妙絕倫的操作系統比肩是他們的最大挑戰。
一個研發團隊試圖改造諾基亞大多數智能手機所使用的老舊的塞班(Symbian)系統﹐而另一個團隊則試圖從頭開始打造一個名為MeeGo的全新操作系統。
據曾經在兩個研發團隊工作過的人說﹐在爭取公司內部支持以及高層關注等問題上兩支團隊相互競爭﹐這一問題困擾著諾基亞的研發業務。
在2006年至2009年擔任諾基亞首席設計師的柯蒂斯(Alastair Curtis)說﹐他們花在政治鬥爭上的時間比花在設計上的時間多。柯蒂斯還說﹐諾基亞的組織結構錯綜複雜﹐想要完成一個連貫、一致且美妙的研發過程對研發團隊來說很難。
例如在2010年﹐諾基亞召集工程師試圖敲定一款軟件的某些細節。這款軟件能讓外部程序員更加方便地編寫出能夠在任何一款諾基亞智能手機上運行的應用程序。
在一些公司﹐可能只要在會議桌旁開個會就能做出此類決定。但據兩位與會人員回憶﹐諾基亞卻將大約100名工程師和產品經理召集到德國美因茨一家酒店的宴會廳內開會﹐他們中一些人甚至是從美國馬薩諸塞州和中國遠道而來的。
在三天的時間里﹐諾基亞員工坐在折疊椅上記著筆記。MeeGo、塞班以及諾基亞內部其它項目組都在努力發出自己的聲音。
一位與會者回憶﹐大家都試圖保住自己的飯碗。每個團隊都有責任拿出最具競爭力的手機。
諾基亞的關鍵業務合作伙伴也感到非常沮喪。在蘋果於2007年6月開始銷售iPhone後不久﹐芯片供應商高通公司(Qualcomm Corp.)和諾基亞就一場專利持久戰達成和解﹐雙方開始在項目上展開合作。
高 通公司首席執行長雅各布(Paul Jacobs)說﹐2008年我們開始和諾基亞展開合作的時候﹐給我留下深刻印象的是﹐和其它設備製造商相比﹐諾基亞花在制定戰略上的時間要多得多。有時 我們會給諾基亞提供一項新技術﹐在我們看來﹐這可能會是一個巨大商機。不過諾基亞不是馬上開始利用這個機會﹐而是花很長時間（可能要六到九個月）來評估這 個機會。等到他們評估好了時﹐機會往往已從手中溜走了。
研究機構Bernstein research的數據表明﹐埃洛普2010年擔任CEO的時候﹐諾基亞每年的研發費用高達50億歐元﹐這一數字佔手機產業研發總經費的30%。但諾基亞始終沒有推出一個足以和iPhone相匹敵的機型。
雅各布說﹐在最近這輪裁減成本之前﹐諾基亞仍然未能很好地把精力集中到有用的研發項目上。埃洛普仔細審查數據﹐拜訪位於全球各地的實驗室﹐親自終止那些非重點項目﹐比如一個可以將印度用戶的手機同新公佈的政府身份識別碼聯繫在一起的工具。
埃洛普重新將業務重心放到定位和地圖服務上。諾基亞2008年花80億美元收購Navteq之後獲得了其定位和地圖業務。
但在推出受消費者歡迎的產品一事上埃洛普碰到了麻煩。諾基亞新出的手機Lumia雖受好評﹐但由於消費者在微軟下一代操作系統軟件今年晚些時候推出前不願購買這款手機﹐Lumia的銷量可能會受到影響。
埃 洛普成為CEO之後不久任命的智能手機業務主管哈洛(Jo Harlow)說﹐諾基亞將在未來幾個月內推出低價Lumia手機﹐以便更好地同中國的華為技術有限公司(Huawei Technologies)等雄心勃勃的亞洲手機廠商競爭。哈洛還說﹐諾基亞也對進入平板電腦市場“非常感興趣”。
埃洛普對銷售和營銷部 進行了一次很大的人事調整。在推出Lumia手機之後﹐埃洛普換掉了首席運營長德瓦德(Jerri DeVard)和另外兩名高管。今年6月﹐埃洛普挑中他在微軟時的同事、現年47歲的韋伯(Chris Weber)接手德瓦德的工作。記者無法聯繫德瓦德置評。
諾基亞在將良好創意轉變為產品方面依然表現得不盡如人意。埃洛普說﹐今年上半年諾基亞提交的專利數量是自2007年以來半年時間內最多的。諾基亞申報的專利總數超過3萬件。埃洛普說﹐可能會出售一些專利以籌集現金。
埃洛普說﹐我們可能會決定出售部分專利﹐以籌集我們更為急需的現金。當企業處在扭虧為盈階段時﹐現金很重要。
Anton Troianovski / Sven Grundberg
Frank Nuovo, the former chief designer at Nokia Corp., NOK +2.37% gave presentations more than a decade ago to wireless carriers and investors that divined the future of the mobile Internet.
More than seven years before Apple Inc. AAPL -0.11% rolled out the iPhone, the Nokia team showed a phone with a color touch screen set above a single button. The device was shown locating a restaurant, playing a racing game and ordering lipstick. In the late 1990s, Nokia secretly developed another alluring product: a tablet computer with a wireless connection and touch screen─all features today of the hot-selling Apple iPad.
'Oh my God,' Mr. Nuovo says as he clicks through his old slides. 'We had it completely nailed.'
Consumers never saw either device. The gadgets were casualties of a corporate culture that lavished funds on research but squandered opportunities to bring the innovations it produced to market.
Nokia led the wireless revolution in the 1990s and set its sights on ushering the world into the era of smartphones. Now that the smartphone era has arrived, the company is racing to roll out competitive products as its stock price collapses and thousands of employees lose their jobs.
This year, Nokia ended a 14-year-run as the world's largest maker of mobile phones, as rival Samsung Electronics Co. 005930.SE -1.20% took the top spot and makers of cheaper phones ate into Nokia's sales volumes. Nokia's share of mobile phone sales fell to 21% in the first quarter from 27% a year earlier, according to market data from IDC. Its share peaked at 40.4% at the end of 2007.
The impact was evident in Nokia's financial report for the first three months of the year. It swung to a loss of 929 million, or $1.1 billion, from a profit of 344 million a year earlier. It had revenue of 7.4 billion, down 29%, and it sold 82.7 million phones, down 24%. Nokia reports its second-quarter results Thursday and has already said losses in its mobile phone business will be worse than expected. Its shares currently trade at 1.37 a share, down 64% so far this year.
Nokia is losing ground despite spending $40 billion on research and development over the past decade─nearly four times what Apple spent in the same period. And Nokia clearly saw where the industry it dominated was heading. But its research effort was fragmented by internal rivalries and disconnected from the operations that actually brought phones to market.
Instead of producing hit devices or software, the binge of spending has left the company with at least two abandoned operating systems and a pile of patents that analysts now say are worth around $6 billion, the bulk of the value of the entire company. Chief Executive Stephen Elop plans to start selling more of that family silver to keep the company going until it can turn around its fortunes.
'If only they had been landed in products,' Mr. Elop said of the company's inventions in a recent interview, 'I think Nokia would have been in a different place.'
Nokia isn't the only company to lose its way in the treacherous cellphone market. Research In Motion Ltd. RIMM +0.43% had a dominant position thanks to its BlackBerry email device, but it hasn't been able to come up with a solution to the iPhone either.
As a result, the company has lost about 90% of its market value in the past five years, and its CEO is trying to convince investors the company isn't in a 'death spiral.'
Whereas RIM lacked the right product, Nokia actually developed the sorts of devices that consumers are gobbling up today. It just didn't bring them to market. In a strategic blunder, it shifted its focus from smartphones back to basic phones right as the iPhone upended the market.
'I was heartbroken when Apple got the jump on this concept,' says Mr. Nuovo, Nokia's former chief designer. 'When people say the iPhone as a concept, a piece of hardware, is unique, that upsets me.'
Mr. Elop, a Canadian who took over as Nokia's first non-Finnish chief executive in 2010, is now trying to refocus a company that he says grew complacent because of its market dominance.
Shortly after taking the job, Mr. Elop scrapped work on Nokia's homegrown smartphone software and said the company would use Microsoft Corp.'s MSFT +2.66% Windows mobile operating system. By doing so, he was able to deliver a new line of phones to compete with the iPhone in less than a year, much quicker than if Nokia had stuck with its own software, he says.
Those phones aren't selling strongly. The company hasn't broken out numbers but said in April that initial sales were 'mixed,' and two months later said competition had been tougher than expected. Mr. Elop was forced in mid-June to announce another 10,000 layoffs and $1.7 billion in cost cuts that will fall heavily on research and development. On Sunday, Nokia cut the U.S. price of the phones in half, to $50.
Nokia has a long history of successfully adapting to big market shifts. The company started out in 1865 as a lumber mill. Over the years, it diversified into electricity production and rubber products.
At the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union's collapse and recession in Europe caused demand for Nokia's diverse slate of products to dry up, leaving the company in crisis. Jorma Ollila, a former Citibank banker, took over as CEO in 1992 and focused Nokia on cellphones.
Nokia factories eventually sprang up from Germany to China, part of a logistics machine so well-oiled that Nokia could feed the world's demand for cellphones faster than any other manufacturer in the world. Profits soared, and the company's share price followed, giving Nokia a market value of 303 billion at its peak in 2000.
Mr. Ollila and other top executives became stars in Finland, often requesting private dining rooms when they went out to eat, senior executives said.
Early on, the CEO started laying the groundwork for the company's next reinvention. Nokia executives predicted that the business of producing cellphones that do little but make calls would lose its profitability by 2000. So the company started spending billions of dollars to research mobile email, touch screens and faster wireless networks.
In 1996, the company unveiled its first smartphone, the Nokia 9000, and called it the first mobile device that could email, fax and surf the Web. It weighed slightly under a pound.
'We had exactly the right view of what it was all about,' says Mr. Ollila, who stepped down as chief executive in 2006 and retired as chairman in May. 'We were about five years ahead.'
The phone, also called the Communicator, made an appearance in the movie 'The Saint' and drew a dedicated following among certain business users, but never commanded a mass audience.
In late 2004, U.S. manufacturer Motorola scored a world-wide hit with its thin Razr flip-phones. Nokia weathered criticism from investors that it was expending too much effort on high-end smartphones while its rival ate into its lucrative business selling expensive 'dumb' phones to upwardly mobile people around the world.
After Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia's former chief financial officer, took the helm from Mr. Ollila in 2006, he merged Nokia's smartphone and basic-phone operations. The result, said several former executives, was that the more profitable basic phone business started calling the shots.
'The Nokia bias went backwards,' said Jari Pasanen, a member of a group Nokia set up in 2004 to create multimedia services for smartphones and now a venture capitalist in Finland. 'It went toward traditional mobile phones.'
Nokia's smartphones had hit the market too early, before consumers or wireless networks were ready to make use of them. And when the iPhone emerged, Nokia failed to recognize the threat.
Nokia engineers' 'tear-down' reports, according to people who saw them, emphasized that the iPhone was expensive to manufacture and only worked on second-generation networks─primitive compared with Nokia's 3G technology. One report noted that the iPhone didn't come close to passing Nokia's rigorous 'drop test,' in which a phone is dropped five feet onto concrete from a variety of angles.
Yet consumers loved the iPhone, and by 2008 Nokia executives had realized that matching Apple's slick operating system amounted to their biggest challenge.
One team tried to revamp Symbian, the aging operating system that ran most Nokia smartphones. Another effort, eventually dubbed MeeGo, tried to build a new system from the ground up.
People involved with both efforts say the two teams competed with each other for support within the company and the attention of top executives─a problem that plagued Nokia's R&D operations.
'You were spending more time fighting politics than doing design,' said Alastair Curtis, Nokia's chief designer from 2006 to 2009. The organizational structure was so convoluted, he added, that 'it was hard for the team to drive through a coherent, consistent, beautiful experience.'
In 2010, for instance, Nokia was hashing out some details of software that would make it easier for outside programmers to write applications that could work on any Nokia smartphone.
At some companies, such decisions might be made around a conference table. In Nokia's case, the meeting involved gathering about 100 engineers and product managers from offices as far-flung as Massachusetts and China in a hotel ballroom in Mainz, Germany, two people who attended the meeting recall.
Over three days, the Nokia employees sat on folding chairs and jotted notes on an array of paper easels. Representatives of MeeGo, Symbian and other programs within Nokia all struggled to make themselves heard.
'People were trying to keep their jobs,' one person there recalls. 'Each group was accountable for delivering the most competitive phone.'
Key business partners were frustrated as well. Shortly after Apple began selling the iPhone in June 2007, chip supplier Qualcomm Corp. QCOM +2.92% settled a long running patent battle with Nokia and began collaborating on projects.
'What struck me when we started working with Nokia back in 2008 was how Nokia spent much more time than other device makers just strategizing,' Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs said. 'We would present Nokia with a new technology that to us would seem as a big opportunity. Instead of just diving into this opportunity, Nokia would spend a long time, maybe six to nine months, just assessing the opportunity. And by that time the opportunity often just went away.'
When Mr. Elop took over as CEO in 2010 Nokia was spending 5 billion a year on R&D─30% of the mobile phone industry's total, according to Bernstein research. Yet it remained far from launching a legitimate competitor to the iPhone.
Before the latest round of cuts, he said, the company was still struggling to focus on useful R&D. Mr. Elop has sifted through data and visited labs around the world to personally terminate projects that weren't core priorities─like one to help buyers in India link their phones to new government identification numbers.
Mr. Elop is refocusing around services like location and mapping, which came with the company's $8 billion 2008 acquisition of Navteq.
But he is having trouble rolling out products that catch on with consumers. Nokia's latest phone, the Lumia, has been well reviewed, but sales may suffer as consumers hold out for the next version of Microsoft's software, due later this year.
Jo Harlow, whom Mr. Elop appointed head of smartphones shortly after he became CEO, said Nokia will launch lower-priced Lumia devices in the coming months to better compete with aggressive Asian device makers such as China's Huawei Technologies. Ms. Harlow said the company is also 'very interested' in entering the tablet market.
Mr. Elop has shaken up a sales and marketing department, replacing Chief Operating Officer Jerri DeVard and two other executives after the Lumia launch. In June, Mr. Elop picked Chris Weber, a 47-year-old former Microsoft colleague who had been running Nokia's North American effort, to take over. Ms. DeVard couldn't be reached for comment.
Nokia still is struggling to turn its good ideas into products. The first half of the year saw Nokia book more patents than in any six-month period since 2007, Mr. Elop said, leaving Nokia with more than 30,000 in all. Some might be sold to raise cash, he said.
'We may decide there could be elements of it that could be sold off, turned into more immediate cash for us─which is something that is important when you're going through a turnaround,' Mr. Elop said.
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