On January 15, Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent marked their first day of combined operations.
“Nokia has gone through a fundamental transformation,” said Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman of the Nokia Board of Directors. “Over 99% of our more than 100 000 employees did not carry a Nokia badge just three short years ago. Our earnings, market cap and growth opportunities have multiplied. We have a powerful guiding vision of the Programmable World, an extremely capable management team and a strong ambition to innovate and lead. We move forward with excitement, confidence and an ability to continue to challenge the status quo.”
Nokia President and CEO, Rajeev Suri, continued: “Today’s pace of technological change, driven by the transition to 5G, the Internet of Things and the cloud, is demanding extraordinary new capabilities from the network. Combining with Alcatel-Lucent comes at just the right time: we can align our product and technology roadmaps for the next generation of network technology at the outset, allowing us to take full advantage of the coming opportunities and better serve customers including communication service providers, governments, internet players and large enterprises. Nokia has the global scale, innovation muscle and end-to-end portfolio to lead this change, and ultimately expand the human possibilities of the connected world.”
Nokia is an innovation powerhouse with some 40 000 R&D professionals, a combined pro forma R&D spend in 2014 of EUR 4.2 billion and a world-leading intellectual property portfolio. Nokia is combining its own proud R&D heritage with the unrivalled history of Bell Labs, which has been awarded 8 Nobel prizes over its lifetime, together creating around 31 000 patent families. The combined company also has a strong financial base from which to grow and invest. On a 2014 pro forma basis, the combined company would have had net sales of EUR 24.7 billion and a non-IFRS operating profit of EUR 2.3 billion; as of June 30, 2015, pro forma combined net cash stood at EUR 8.1 billion.
