Nokia names Rajeev Suri new CEO
CNN's Richard Quest and Jim Boulden speak about Nokia's new CEO Rajeev Suri and Nokia's challenges in moving forward.
There is a new boss in Nokia. Steven is out. He is over Microsoft now on devices, and he took Nokia's handset business with him. The new manager that replaces him is Rafeev Suri, he helped turn around the company's telecom network devision which accounts for most of the revenues in the business that Nokia plans to keep.
Think about this as the Internet things plus a lot of intelligence where billions of programmbale objects become programmable systems which then become a programmable world where software will be at the heart of nearly everything that we create and we do.
Well, we try to get Mr. Suri to come on to the program and tell exactly what he is planning to do. He wasn't available. Jim is now going to hopefully discuss with us what Mr. Suri is going to do. Nokia has lost money with handsets for some time, are they rid of a bad lot?
Whether they get rid of the bad lot, they got a lot of money for it of course. They are gonna use that money for buying back for shares. So shareholders are quite happy. We did see Nokia share soared today and also they pay off some of its debt which is a good thing because Nokia has had a lot of debt for a while. So it is using the money wisely, I don't want to say it today. The question is can the networks business carry it forward. Of couse it's the big boring side, of the back side of the telecom network that they are going to focus on. They are also going to focus on the mapping system. Nokia still owns the mapping system that we see in many GPSes. And they hope of course even to be on Nokia phones, even though they don't own those handsets anymore. And also they own a lot of patents. That's the third thing they have, they can call that technology. So Nokia still has a lot going for. So what they need to do now I think they need to get out of the public eye, you know, now they don't have a mobile phone. Now you alike can't slam on every quarter about how badly it's going for the handset. They can get on the business and start competing with H and Erricson, doing the plummy behind the scenes and we can see whether the new CEO can do that. He of course comes from the networking sites and he knows how to do the business and as you say that's where the revenue comes from.
And whenever I speak to Hans and Ericson. You know,It is the depth with which these companies go into that is extraordinary. For instance, Ericson does the billing for many global telecoms companies when we are whirling around the world. Nokia is obvioiusly is going to be going to that sort of area.
Yes, remember Nokia is actually the old Nokia Simens we used to call it as well which they own. And they become services company. And so you think the way that IBM transformed itself very successfully with just not sell the computers, forget about the computers, sell the services behind it, run the network for companis, do the upgrades, control it all for these companies and get paid a huge amount of money to run those services and then do the upgrades, cuz that of course the best thing about it. Once you are in the building, then you can continue to sell upgrades and that's how Nokia plans to compete with H who needs to continue to move into and Ericson who also,as you say, does a very job on that as well. And so they become the three big suppliers in the world and they can forget about the handset.