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**$NOK - I've been holding this "dead phone company" for over a year and I'm not selling**
Been holding Nokia for over a year while everyone told me I was bagholding a Nokia from 2003. Turns out I wasn't wrong, just early. Let me explain why I'm still not selling and why I think most people still haven't figured out what this company actually is now.
**First, forget everything you think you know about Nokia**
Yes they made phones. Yes they got destroyed by the iPhone. That was literally 18 years ago. The company you're looking at today builds the physical infrastructure that AI runs on. Different business, different management, different thesis entirely.
The problem is the name. "Nokia" still makes people think of a brick phone with Snake on it. That mental image is actively keeping the stock cheap and I'm fine with that for now.
**The PE setup**
Current PE is around 95, forward PE at 33, stock sitting around $15-16.
Here's where it gets interesting. The old comparable for Nokia was Ericsson — trading at 17x. Boring telecom equipment. Fair enough.
But Nokia just bought Infinera and is repositioning as optical and AI infrastructure. New comparables are Ciena (216x PE) and Arista Networks (54x PE). Those are the names the market pays up for because they're AI infrastructure plays.
Nokia is sitting in no man's land right now, priced like a telecom vendor, quietly becoming an AI infrastructure company. When the market figures out which bucket to put it in, the multiple rerates.
Conservative end at Arista's 54x? That's roughly **$27**. And that's the boring outcome.
**They're spending €4.9 billion a year on R&D**
That's roughly 20-25% of revenue going straight back into future tech. Most people look at Nokia's 3-4% net margin and think the business is weak. It's not, they're choosing to reinvest almost everything.
If they stopped R&D cold tomorrow the net margin would jump to somewhere around 27-28%. This is a profitable business running a long game, not a struggling one.
They own Bell Labs. 100 years of fundamental research. 20,000+ patents. The licensing division alone prints money regardless of what happens with equipment sales.
**The defence pivot nobody is talking about**
Nokia Federal Solutions exists specifically to serve the US government. They're deploying private 5G networks for defence applications, think secure battlefield communications, not your phone signal.
Current partners: US government, Lockheed Martin, NVIDIA (who dropped $1 billion into Nokia as a strategic investment), Motorola Solutions for UK defence.
Defence contracts are sticky, high margin, and not subject to the pricing wars that kill telecom equipment margins. This is early innings.
**Huawei is getting banned everywhere and there are only two Western alternatives**
Nokia and Ericsson. That's it. That's the entire list of companies that can build full 5G/6G infrastructure at scale without being a national security risk.
Germany is ripping Huawei out by 2026. UK by 2027. The US has been locked for years. Every country that kicks Huawei out needs someone to replace them. There are two options. Nokia is one of them.
Western governments need Nokia to exist and win. That's not a thesis, that's geopolitics. The EU and US are not going to let the only Western 6G vendor die.
**6G and AI-RAN, the part with no price target**
Nokia and NVIDIA are putting AI processing directly inside the radio tower hardware. Not in a cloud server somewhere, in the actual antenna. The tower itself runs AI models, makes real time decisions in microseconds, optimizes coverage and bandwidth on the fly.
6G specs get finalized 2028. Commercial deployment 2029-2030.
If AI-RAN works at scale Nokia stops being just an equipment vendor and starts being an AI infrastructure platform with a completely new revenue model. No comparable exists. Can't put a number on it. Either it's transformative or it isn't.
**What is AI-RAN actually mean?**
**In simple terms: it's the bridge between your phone and the internet**
Every time your phone sends or receives anything — a text, a video call, a Google search — it doesn't connect directly to the internet. It first connects wirelessly to a nearby cell tower. That cell tower contains the **Radio Access Network (RAN) hardware**. It translates your phone's radio signals into data that can travel through cables to the core network and out to the internet.
**What the hardware physically does:**
**Antennas** — capture the radio waves your phone emits and broadcast signals back to it. Modern 5G uses "Massive MIMO" — towers with 64, 128, even 256 antennas packed together, all pointing signals precisely at your device rather than broadcasting in all directions like older towers.
**Baseband Units (BBU)** — the "brain" of the tower. It processes the raw radio signals, encodes/decodes data, manages which frequencies each device uses, and handles handoffs when you move between towers. This is where Nokia puts the AI.
**Remote Radio Units (RRU)** — sit physically on the tower close to the antennas, amplify signals going out and clean up signals coming in.
**Why putting AI in here specifically matters:**
Today the BBU follows fixed rules — "if signal drops below X, do Y." With AI inside the hardware it can:
* Predict interference before it happens
* Shape the antenna beams in real time per device
* Decide in microseconds which frequency band suits each user
* Cut power consumption when a cell is quiet
The reason Nokia partnered with NVIDIA specifically is that running AI models fast enough to make these microsecond decisions requires serious GPU-like processing power *inside the tower hardware itself* — not sent to a cloud server and back, because that round trip would be too slow.
So essentially Nokia is turning every cell tower from a fast-but-dumb relay into a small intelligent computing node. Multiply that by millions of towers worldwide and you start to see why it's a big deal — and why it justifies the R&D spend.
**Current reality:**
* 4G latency: \~30-50ms
* 5G today: \~5-10ms
* 5G + AI target: \~1ms or less
1ms sounds trivial. But it's the difference between possible and impossible for certain things.
**The texting analogy** You're right that 30ms vs 1ms feels identical to a human — we can't perceive anything under \~100ms anyway. So for texting, calls, Netflix, social media — it makes zero difference to you personally.
**Where it becomes a completely different technology:**
**Self-driving cars** — a car at 100km/h travels about 3cm in 1ms. At 30ms latency it travels nearly a meter before the network can react to a hazard ahead. That gap is the difference between a safe brake and a crash. The car needs to communicate with other cars, traffic signals, and infrastructure *faster than human reaction time*.
**Remote surgery** — a surgeon in London operating a robotic arm in Dubai. At 30ms the robot hand lags noticeably behind the surgeon's movements. At 1ms it feels physically present. This is actually being tested right now.
**Factory robots** — hundreds of robotic arms on an assembly line coordinating with each other wirelessly. One mistimed signal at 30ms latency and parts collide. At 1ms they can work millimeters apart safely.
**Options market has been calling this for nearly a year**
Put/call volume ratio has been sitting below 0.20 for almost 12 months straight. Right now some expirations are hitting 0.03. Short interest is only 1.08% of float — basically nobody is betting against it.
For context AMD's put/call ratio is 0.90. MU is 0.65. The options market on NOK has been one-directional for a long time. That's not a meme spike, that's sustained conviction.
https://preview.redd.it/hcx13gtpby3h1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=913df90bdcea3aa5718d8c270c6770d14996164f
https://preview.redd.it/l7bqf4kqby3h1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc2f49afc66a20a2bdf476d8f01a5f9a67c82283
**What can go wrong**
Huawei somehow keeps winning deals despite bans. Open RAN commoditize their hardware. 6G gets delayed 5 years. NVIDIA decides to build the whole stack themselves and cuts Nokia out.
Real risks. Not ignoring them. Sized my position accordingly, decent bet, not the whole account.
**The bottom line**
$27 is the boring conservative outcome if the market just reprices Nokia from telecom to AI infrastructure comps. Everything above that depends on AI-RAN, 6G, and defence playing out.
Been holding over a year through everyone telling me this was a dead company. The thesis keeps getting stronger not weaker. Not selling.
**Positions: Shares + calls. Not telling you what to do with your money.**
[Position from 8 months ago \( which is sold for 3k% profit, and reposition for higher strike \)](https://preview.redd.it/6qwy6q6sby3h1.png?width=757&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c1719f65485d47ec1df7ebb343f5a615af64b40)
[Current positions \( split between 2 accounts \)](https://preview.redd.it/n9vnlr5tby3h1.png?width=979&format=png&auto=webp&s=891fb175acb422f8d5d4011c70d058d1e7697d89)
https://preview.redd.it/wr8vxh6uby3h1.png?width=1005&format=png&auto=webp&s=829bd9691b18abce049e385bb538ddcbc59e92da
*Not financial advice. Do your own research. I'm just a person who spent way too long researching a Finnish company when I should've been sleeping. \[ I asked Claude to rewrite the whole thing so it will sound like an AI written but all the research were made by myself \]*