Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript October 17, 2024 4:30 AM ET

For the period ending September 30, 2024

May 10, 2023 8:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

David Mulholland

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Nokia's Third Quarter 2024 Results Call. I'm David Mulholland, Head of Nokia Investor Relations.

And today, with me is Pekka Lundmark, our President and CEO, along with Marco Wirén, our CFO. Before we get started, a quick disclaimer. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding our future business, proposed transactions and financial performance, and these statements are predictions that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may therefore differ materially from the results we currently expect. Factors that could cause such differences can be both external as well as internal operating factors. We have identified such risks in the Risk Factors section of our Annual Report on Form 20-F, which is available on our Investor Relations website.

Within today's presentation, references to growth rates will mostly be on a constant currency basis and we will refer to margins, it will be based on our comparable reporting. Please note that our Q3 report and the presentation that accompanies this call are published on our website. The report includes both reported and comparable financial results, and a reconciliation between the two.

In terms of the agenda for today’s call, Pekka will go through our key messages for the quarter, Marco will then go into more detail on our financial performance and then Pekka will make a few comments on a particular highlights from Q3, we'll move to Q&A.

With that, let me hand over to Pekka.

Pekka Lundmark

Thank you, David, and thank you for all joining us today. Overall, the big picture is that the market is turning, but it's turning slowly. We see encouraging signs of market recovery in Fixed Networks and IP Networks, but even if it is a bit slower than we expected earlier this year, and Optical Networks and Mobile Networks remain weaker.

Fixed Networks grew 9% in the quarter, while IP Networks grew 6%. Originally, both saw strong growth in North America, as the inventory digestion is now largely behind us and operator deployment plans have solidified. Demand trends in NI continue to improve with solid order intake growth, and a book-to-bill above one. We also saw a significant improvement in our gross margin with all business groups contributing. We continue to take quick action on our cost savings program and have now achieved EUR 500 million in run rate gross cost savings. The quarter also saw good deal momentum. We signed a number of important deals across all business groups, and I'll touch on some of these later in the presentation.