The more things change, the more they stay the same at Nokia

Will 2026 mark a turning point? The Finnish group reported fairly encouraging quarterly results yesterday, with sales up 7% over the first nine months, driven almost entirely by demand from AI and cloud customers and, by extension, by its acquisition of Infinera in 2025.

Restructuring costs, meanwhile, have not disappeared: the group has just raised its forecast for 2026 charges to €1.1bn, from €800m previously.

Last year, the €2.5bn acquisition was welcomed by the market. Nvidia’s announcement a few months later that it would invest in the Finnish group, a €1bn deal that was anecdotal in scale for the chip designer, provided the market with another positive signal.

More will nevertheless be needed to convince the skeptics, who were likely put off by Nokia’s dismal track record in external growth: a decade ago, its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent resulted in an epic destruction of value, all the more so in a context where the relevance of investments in AI infrastructure is being legitimately called into question after a historic surge.

Nokia’s telecom segment remains under pressure, with no visible improvement on the horizon. Heavily indebted, squeezed by shareholders hungry for dividends and strangled by rising interest rates, operators everywhere are curbing their infrastructure investments.

Yet at its current valuation multiples, with its dividend yield at a 20-year low and its operating profit multiple at a high, the market continues to place considerable confidence in the group’s growth prospects.

In other words, yet another disappointment will be punished without mercy, and if the AI bubble deflates, Nokia will be counted, like many others, among the collateral damage.

© MarketScreener.com – 2026