Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Nokia Oyj (NYSE:NOK) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript April 23, 2026

Nokia Oyj misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.05856 EPS, expectations were $0.06.

David Mulholland: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Nokia’s First Quarter 2026 Results Call. I’m David Mulholland, Head of Nokia Investor Relations. Today with me is Justin Hotard, our President and CEO; along with Marco Wiren, our CFO. Before we get started, a quick disclaimer. During this call, we will be making forward-looking statements regarding our future business 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 and portfolio basis and other financial items will be relating to our comparable reporting. Please note that our Q1 report and a presentation that accompanies this call are published on our website. The report includes both reported and comparable financial results and reconciliation between the two. In terms of the agenda for today, Justin will go through our key messages for the quarter. Marco will then go through the financial performance, and we’ll then move to Q&A. With that, let me hand over to Justin.

Justin Hotard: Thank you, David, and good morning, everyone. Our first quarter gave us a solid start to 2026. Net sales grew 4% to EUR 4.5 billion with an operating margin of 6.2%, and we delivered a free cash flow of EUR 629 million in the quarter. Gross profit was EUR 2 billion and gross margin expanded 320 basis points, supported in part by the absence of a onetime charge in mobile infrastructure in the prior year. It also benefited from strong performance in Optical Networks as we began to see the synergy benefits from the Infinera acquisition. Operating profit was EUR 281 million, with operating margin expanding 200 basis points. We saw strong momentum with AI and cloud customers. Net sales grew 49%, and we received EUR 1 billion in new orders, particularly driven by Optical Networks.

At the group level, book-to-bill was above 1. And in Network Infrastructure, it was well above 1. I’m proud of Team Nokia’s execution in Q1. The focus now is on delivering through the year and maximizing the growth opportunity in front of us. At our Capital Markets Day last November, we outlined our view of the AI super cycle and the market opportunity for Nokia. Since then, demand has accelerated. At the time, expectations were for the largest hyperscalers to spend around $540 billion in CapEx in 2026. Now, those expectations have increased to over $700 billion. This reflects the pace at which our customers are scaling infrastructure for AI. Today, AI-driven traffic is estimated at around 20% of total network traffic, which is roughly 80 exabytes per month and is still primarily human to machine.

As we move deeper into agentic AI adoption and ultimately physical AI adoption, machine-to-machine traffic will become the primary driver of traffic, and that will lead to a step change in network traffic. We already see this demand in AI factories, both in data center interconnect and inside the data center in routing and switching. Increasingly, this is also driving demand in transport networks across metro and long haul, and we believe this is a structural shift in the market, which will sustain for multiple years. We now expect our AI and cloud addressable market to grow at a 27% CAGR between 2025 and 2028, up from the 16% we shared in November. This implies the addressable market for network infrastructure growing at a 14% CAGR compared to 9% that we shared in November.

Q&A Session

This is already benefiting Nokia in orders and in revenue. In March, we introduced several new products at OFC. These launches reflect our focus on accelerating innovation following the Infinera acquisition. The industry is scaling from hundreds to thousands of fibers between data centers. To address this demand, we introduced our next-generation hyperscale multi-rail solution, which will begin shipping later this year. It scales fiber capacity without expanding physical infrastructure, delivers an 8x increase in density and is 25% more dense than competing products announced recently. In addition, we also shared that we’re evolving how we bring optical solutions to market. Our road map moves to a building block architecture with 4 optical engines that are embedded in multiple form factors compared to the 2 engines per generation previously.

The architecture allows us to bring 13 application-optimized solutions to market. For customers, this means simplified deployment and a reduced total cost of ownership of up to 70%. These products will begin sampling in the first half of 2027 and will ship in volume in the second half. In Q1, we also saw strong growth in our IP networks pipeline as we build deeper engagements with our AI and cloud customers on switching and routing. We were awarded new design wins and continue to build a strong pipeline of further opportunities. We expect this to translate into new orders over the coming quarters. We’ve also increased our investment in optical networks and our new indium phosphide manufacturing facility in San Jose, California is on track to begin ramping production later this year.

As a result, we are increasing our growth assumptions for network infrastructure in 2026. We now expect growth between 12% to 14%, up from the 6% to 8% we communicated in January. For Optical and IP networks combined, we expect growth of 18% to 20%, up from 10% to 12%. Turning now to Mobile Infrastructure. This new segment began operating in January, and the team is focused on aligning our road map to customer needs, streamlining the integrated business to improve productivity and delivering on the KPIs we outlined at our Capital Markets Day. Core software had another strong quarter, growing 5% and gaining market share. In the quarter, we delivered 6 competitive swaps. Our customers are modernizing their platforms with cloud-native solutions, adopting new security features and driving end-to-end automation with a focus on reducing operating expenses.

Radio networks also delivered on our expectations. We signed several deals in the quarter, including with Virgin Media O2. At Mobile World Congress, we introduced a new generation of radios that are AI RAN ready. Our Doksuri remote radio heads deliver a 30% improvement in power efficiency and up to a 25% reduction in weight. In addition, we continue to make good progress on AI RAN in partnership with NVIDIA, and we are on track to begin field trials by the end of the year. Technology standards continue to perform well across its markets. The business continues to deliver stability, and we expect largely flat net sales for the full year with improved profit generation year-over-year. With that, I’ll hand over to Marco.

Marco Wiren: Thank you, Justin, and hello from my side as well. As Justin mentioned, we had a solid start to the year with EUR 4.5 billion in sales, growing 4% with growth in both operating segments. Gross profit was just over EUR 2 billion with a gross margin of 45.5%, a 320 basis points improvement on year-on-year. Operating profit was EUR 281 million, with an operating margin of 6.2%, and this is up 200 basis points compared to the previous year. Free cash flow was EUR 629 million, and the quarter ended with a net cash of EUR 3.8 billion. Network Infrastructure sales grew 6% in quarter 1. Optical Networks had another strong quarter with 20% net sales growth, and this is mainly driven by AI and cloud customers. We also grew in telecom as operators invest to meet increasing demands on transport networks.

IP Network sales grew 3% with growth in AI and cloud, offset by softness in other customer segments during the quarter. We expect growth in IP Networks to start to accelerate in quarter 2 as we ramp shipments tied to new design wins with AI and cloud customers. Fixed Networks declined by 13%, reflecting our portfolio strategy to focus on higher-margin products. Sales of our optical line terminal products were largely stable in the quarter. And looking ahead, we expect the sales trend to improve as the year progresses. We see a supportive demand environment, especially in the U.S. with fiber deployments remaining a key investment focus for Tier 1 operators. Gross margin in Network Infrastructure was 43.4%, increasing 150 basis points. The increase was driven by a higher gross margin in Optical Networks, benefiting mainly from Infinera integration synergies and scale.

We continue to expect some gross margin headwinds through the year as a result of product mix. Operating margin was 6.7%, a 30 basis points below the previous year as we had a full quarter of Infinera expenses compared to 1 month last year. For the full year, we do expect to slightly increase the Network Infrastructure operating margin. However, our focus this year is on investing to capture the long-term growth opportunity in the market. In Mobile Infrastructure, net sales grew by 3%. Core software sales grew 5%, while Radio Networks sales were flat. Technology Standards sales grew by 10% as a result of signing several deals in consumer electronics and multimedia, which contributed catch-up sales in the quarter. Gross margin increased by 430 basis points to 48.5%, in line with our long-term target for mobile infrastructure gross margins.

The increase was mainly related to EUR 120 million contract settlement, which negatively impacted the previous year. We expect Mobile Infrastructure gross margins in the second and third quarters to be somewhat weaker and then much stronger in quarter 4. And this is consistent with the typical seasonality in the business. Operating margin was 8.9% in the quarter, an increase of 380 basis points, reflecting the settlement impact and lower operating expenses supported by the ongoing cost-saving program. If we then turn to look at our sales growth by customer segment, AI and Cloud grew 49%, mainly driven by Optical Networks. Mission-critical Enterprise and Defense grew 19% and Technology licensing grew 10%. These growing markets offset a 2% decline in telecom to deliver 4% growth for the group.

The decline among telecom customers was partly related to some of the portfolio decisions we are taking in Fixed Networks. Overall, we continue to see the telecom market as relatively flat. The quarter 1 was a strong quarter for free cash flow generation, which amounted to EUR 629 million. We saw the typical working capital unwind in the first quarter related to the receivables buildup at the end of ’25 from a strong quarter 4 sales seasonality. For your models, remember that quarter 2 is typically a seasonally low period for cash as we pay employee cash incentives in that quarter. Finally, to our ’26 guidance assumptions. Our group level financial outlook remains unchanged, and we are currently tracking somewhat above the midpoint of the range for comparable operating profit, which is between EUR 2 billion and EUR 2.5 billion.

Justin has already mentioned the 2 key assumptions for the full year that have changed. We now target to grow faster in Network Infrastructure this year with 12% to 14% growth, up from the previous assumption of 6% to 8%. And specifically in Optical and IP Networks, we now target 18% to 20% growth, up from the previous 10% to 12% growth. Then regarding quarter 2, we currently assume a 5% to 9% sequential increase in net sales. For operating profit, we expect quarter 2 to account for between 12% and 16% of the full year based on the comment I already made that we are tracking somewhat above the midpoint of the full year range. This would equate to H1 being between 24% and 28% of the full year operating profit, consistent with 2025. And this is mainly due to the growth-related investments we are making to support the long-term opportunities in the business.

And with that, let me hand back to David for Q&A.

David Mulholland: Thank you, Justin and Marco. As usual, for the Q&A session, as a courtesy to others in the queue, could you please limit yourself to 1 question and a brief follow-up. Sherry, could you please give the instructions?

Operator: Yes, sir. Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand it back to you, Mr. David Mulholland.

David Mulholland: Thanks, Sherry. We’ll take our first question today from Fredrik Lithell from Handelsbanken.

Fredrik Lithell: Congrats, a great report. I would like to step into the world of Optical Networks and ask you your raised assumption for the year. Is that based on that you see more positively on getting better traction on sort of production capacity throughout the year, so earlier than you anticipated before? Or is there something else in there that gives you the opportunity to raise that guidance?

Justin Hotard: Yes. Thanks, Fredrik. So I think 2 things I would touch on. I think one is a little bit more confidence on supply. And obviously, the fab is one component. There’s also the other — the components of the optical subsystems, the DSPs, obviously, that’s in pluggables. Obviously, as you think about our larger systems, there’s multiple different elements to that. So it’s a bit more supply confidence on optical from — obviously, as we said, demand is strong — demand continues to be strong on optical. And then it’s also related to some of the traction we’re starting to see in IP networking. And as we’ve talked about in the past, the IP networking business has been a little bit lumpy as we drive the growth, but we’re starting to see more visibility for the year, and that’s a part of what’s driving the growth.

David Mulholland: Did you have a follow-up, Fredrik?

Fredrik Lithell: I’m fine with that.

David Mulholland: Thanks Fredrik. We’ll take our next question from Janardan Menon from Jefferies. Janardan, please go ahead.

Janardan Menon: Just wanted to dive into the design wins and the EUR 1 billion that you’ve reported saying most of that or the bigger portion of that is from Optical. Are these still on the 800 gig side? You had put out a very impressive portfolio of products at the 1.6T, 2.4T, 3.2T at OFC, which you said would be starting to come through by late 2027. So are you already seeing some order intake on those? Or is it too early for those kind of more leading-edge products to be — or next-generation products we’re seeing orders right now? And I have a small followup.

Justin Hotard: Yes. First of all, thanks, Janardan. So I think if you look at the demand that we’re seeing — the demand that we’re fulfilling, I should say, for this year, I really see that momentum on the back of our 800-gig pluggable and then the associated line systems and the platforms that we have available and shipping today. A key thing that I maybe didn’t touch on in my comments, I’ll just emphasize is that the road map we launched at OFC, I touched on the fact that it’s largely oriented towards 2027. But a key note there is that road map was designed with a real focus on AI and cloud customers and designed in collaboration with some of those customers. So we talk a lot about that customer collaboration. I talked about it at CMD a little bit.

We talk about it quite a bit internally, and that’s a good example. And then as I would just kind of give you macro broad brush orders, I think what we see in orders generally is some elongation in orders in terms of a desire for a longer-term commitment on orders. And that’s, of course — that’s also something we’re seeing in terms of our demand back into the supply chain, providing longer-term commitments. And I think that’s very normal with the kind of demand expansion we’re seeing in the lead times. And I think if you look at other — our peers or other players in our ecosystem in this space, they’re all saying similar things. So I would say that, that’s very consistent for us as well.

Janardan Menon: Understood. And I know you don’t want to talk about growth in Networks and Optical separately, but it’s been quite a big increase in — it’s quite a big increase in your guidance from 10% to 12% to 18% to 20%. Is most of that from Optical? Or are you going to see a meaningful acceleration in your IP side from Q2 onwards, which could, say, take you towards the double-digit 10% kind of growth rates there by the end of the year?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I would say that the optimism we have on the 18% to 20% is across both sides of the business right now.

David Mulholland: We’ll take our next question from Artem Beletski from SEB. Artem, please go ahead.

Artem Beletski: I would like to ask on AI and cloud-related orders. So I think book-to-bill was around 3 in the quarter. And when do you actually expect some catch-up to be seen in terms of deliveries? And could you maybe talk still about some potential delivery constraints what you have in this area?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I think, Artem, first of all, I’d say right now, I’m focused on maximizing the opportunity that we see. And I don’t see the book-to-bill is something I need — we need to catch up to. Our focus right now is on just maximizing the demand. As I said as well, we are starting to see some elongation of the order cycle, which is normal in these. And then in terms of constraints, I mean, I won’t get into too much detail, but I think it’s — generally, it’s — there’s a fair amount of constraint in the semiconductor ecosystem in general. We don’t talk about it, but if you think about the kinds of lead times you hear across the semiconductor manufacturers, the leading players, I think that gives you a pretty good indication of what lead times are, and then obviously, in other areas, at the scale that we’re building indium phosphide as an industry, obviously, that’s driving demand back into the supply chain that we need to build capacity for.

And so we’re working on that as well. And that gets a little bit to the point on investment. As you think about investment, I would think about it in optical in a few ways, right? One is investing and scaling the capability and capacity. We’re obviously bringing on the second fab, but it’s scaling production capability into the supply chain. And then, of course, continuing to invest in the product portfolio to make sure we’re maximizing the coverage of the portfolio against the market demand that we see.

David Mulholland: Thanks Artem. Did you have a quick follow-up?

Artem Beletski: Yes, I had actually. So just relating to fixed networks. So you do highlight some headwind coming from consumer premise fiber business that is not seen strategic. Is it something that should be prevailing throughout this year or how we should think about it?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I think it’s something that is going to — we’re going to continue to be disciplined throughout the year. And there’s probably two things to consider here. One is the macro market on fiber, particularly with what’s happening in the U.S., we talked about some of this last year with the CapEx builds of the Tier 1 and Tier 2 operators, obviously, beat us some tailwind. So we feel good about the underlying business, but we want to make sure that we’re focused on the right type of business for us long term. And so we expect that we’ll have — continue to have some headwind on the CPE side as we become more disciplined in that space and focus on the areas where it’s valued. We also think this is a business that has good long-term prospects in data center.

And we launched at OFC. I didn’t touch on it, but at OFC, we launched an out-of-band management solution oriented towards data center. So we really like this business and we realized it was a bit of a tough quarter. It’s just a situation where we’re going through what I think is a very intentional transition to making sure the business has a long-term sustainable growth profile, not just in top line, but more importantly, in gross margin and operating profit.

David Mulholland: Thanks Artem. We’ll take our next question from Simon Leopold from Raymond James.

Simon Leopold: Thank you, David. So the first thing I wanted to touch on was, in the past, you’ve floated this idea of growing the switching business by on the order of EUR 1 billion into hyperscale opportunities. I’m wondering with — given sort of the commentary today and the wins you’ve had, could you update us on really the current opportunities in the sales funnel and longer-term prospects for this business unit?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I don’t — Simon, I’m not sure there’s much more that we’ll say than what we described, but maybe just to kind of break it down a little bit. Good design wins in Q1. Those don’t show up meaningfully in orders. They’re in pipeline, but they’re not in orders in Q1. So we expect to see some of that start to flow in, in Q2. And as you likely know, these businesses are more design win driven. And what I mean by that is it’s not a procurement event where you kind of — you have a procurement, and then if you’re awarded that, you win that procurement, then you go to the next procurement. It’s more about getting designed into a specific use case and application. And so that means that the sales cycle is a little bit longer, but encouraged by the progress that we’re making here, and we’ll continue to update you as we see the longer-term forecast. But I’m really pleased with the work that the team is doing and the progress we’re making.

Simon Leopold: And then as a quick follow-up here. It does seem as if the press release cadence in the mobility business has stepped up a bit. And you didn’t talk that much about it today, but I just want to get a better feeling. You mentioned the field trial for the AI RAN. Wondering if there’s any movement change in your view on how this particular business unit in mobility RAN might be trending, particularly relative to how you talked about it last quarter.

Justin Hotard: Yes. I think, first of all, Simon, a couple of things. One is, and we touched on this a little bit in our — well our segment performance shows it, and I think we touched on it. Overall, the telecom market is flat. I think what we realize is that strategically, this is a market where we need to find new sources of value, and those can come either from enabling new services for the telcos to monetize or a business that’s less CapEx intensive. And I think we fundamentally believe that the future is much more of an evolution and is software-driven. We’ve talked about that in a number of forums. What I’m very pleased about right now is that the AI-RAN trials and the engagement around a model that will fundamentally be different for the baseband because we’ll start to detach software innovation.

And what I mean by that is not just features, but actual performance enhancements from the underlying hardware, just like you see model performance gets better in AI with GPUs, but you continue to see model performance improve even over the life of the same GPU. It’s one of the benefits of that architecture. We see that same thing coming in this part of the business. And so I’m really pleased that we’re seeing such strong interest from the industry. And I think this is a business as we — as I said at CMD, our focus is not on making the business necessarily a growth business because the underlying market is not growing, but to make it one that’s much more profitable and delivers an attractive return on invested capital. And that’s our focus.

I’m very pleased with the start the team has coming together in MI. Obviously, a lot more work to do and a big milestone later this year with NVIDIA.

David Mulholland: Thanks, Simon. We’ll take our next question from Rob Sanders at Deutsche Bank. Rob, please go ahead.

Robert Sanders: Maybe just a question around profitability in optical. I think originally with the Infinera deal, you were looking at double-digit operating margin. But clearly, you’re stepping up your investment. So I was just wondering if you’re still sort of on track to hit that target maybe by next year? The second question would just be around hiring and OpEx. Given the opportunity is clearly growing, what is your view around OpEx growth this year?

Justin Hotard: Do you want to take those?

Marco Wiren: Yes. When it comes to the Optical, just like when we announced the deal in Infinera deal, we said that we aim for double-digit operating margins, and this is something we are still believing in. We’ve seen a very good synergy work that the teams have been doing, and we are on track or actually ahead of our targets when it comes to synergy captures. So we’re very pleased with that work. And also when it comes to — if you look the combination of these 2 companies, how well they actually complemented each other. And this has been extremely successful among our customers as well. So we have had very good design wins. We were very fast to decide on the road map. And this is one reason why we’ve seen these good wins on the Optical side.

So there’s a lot of positive things that we’ve seen, thanks to that integration and acquisition. Yes. And when it comes to OpEx, we’ve just said that we invest in capturing these opportunities in Optical side. And just like Justin mentioned earlier, supply is constrained. So we are investing in securing that we get the supply that is needed. So we focus on that. Otherwise, we don’t guide any specific OpEx numbers.

David Mulholland: Thanks Rob. We’ll take our next question from Ulrich Rathe from Bernstein. Ulrich, please go ahead.

Ulrich Rathe: I have 2 questions. The first one would be, so you’re maintaining the group EBIT outlook with this higher growth in Optical, IP and you’re explaining that you want to secure growth with higher investments. Could you talk a little bit more about the mix of these costs? Is this more R&D? Is it more sales and marketing? Is it more into production? Just more color on that cost increase would be helpful. That would be my first one.

Justin Hotard: I think, first of all, Ulrich, and I’ll let Marco add if he needs to. But just to remind you, we always provide a range, and we give you some direction on the range, right? So we’re not changing our guidance, which is the range. What we — and we said we’re slightly above — we’re guiding somewhat above the midpoint, right? So the key thing here for us is as we look at the business, we’re making investments, and you touched on a number of them. It’s R&D, obviously, sales and marketing and production. And Marco just touched on some of that, right? It’s — there’s obviously — there’s CapEx with the work that we’re doing around the fab. But there’s also investment in OpEx and scaling capability and manufacturing.

And if you just think about what’s happening in this part of the business, particularly around Optical, we’re also going through a massive step function in volume as an industry. And so that means that we actually have to do work to mature the supply chain, mature the production capability as an industry, and we’re not immune to that. So we’re investing to make sure that we’re successful in that and that we can capture the fullness of the opportunity around us.

Marco Wiren: I think this is pretty much the same actually, if you look also the whole industry in Optical side. So the whole supply chain is doing the same as well to secure that we actually can capture those demand opportunities. But still, there’s more demand than supply. So that’s why it’s important that we invest in capturing these opportunities.

David Mulholland: Did you have a follow-up, Ulrich.

Ulrich Rathe: Yes, a quick follow-up maybe. On this guidance upgrades and for the Optical growth, there still seems to be a relative dearth of customer announcements with hyperscalers. Could you talk about the reasons? You talked in the past about that you don’t actually care that much, you’d rather care about the business. But is there possibly a hesitation on the side of the hyperscalers to talk about Nokia given Nokia is not a U.S. company? Or are there any other specific reasons why you wouldn’t have sort of more meaningful announcement that tell us what you’re doing with which hyperscaler and these kinds of questions?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I think, Ulrich, you probably have to talk to our customer or perhaps through who they are, but you could ask customers about us. From my perspective, that’s not my priority. My priority is making sure we’re partnering with them effectively. We’re delivering what they need, and we’re helping them execute on their strategies. That’s my focus. And obviously, we’re capturing our share of the opportunity that’s out there. So that’s where I spend my time. Obviously, I think what’s a little bit different about us than some of the U.S. players more broadly is that we also don’t have a concentration dynamic because the business is more diversified. And so that may be also something, but there’s no indication that I get that there’s any kind of geopolitical dynamic to this.

David Mulholland: Thanks Ulrich. We’ll take our next question from Richard Kramer from Arete.

Richard Kramer: Justin, you mentioned the elongation of the order book. Can you tell us how much of that EUR 1 billion of new contract orders is firm, i.e., that you have purchase orders against it versus long-term sort of frame contracts, just to understand the timing of realizing that additional incremental EUR 1 billion of orders.

Justin Hotard: Yes. Actually, Richard, this is a great question. So just to clarify, we have — actually across the business, including with our telco customers, we have multiyear frame agreements. And sometimes we announce some of those. But the only thing you see in orders is firm purchase orders with delivery dates. What we haven’t dimensionalized for you is anything kind of above a certain lead time. But we are — one thing we are seeing is some of that elongation. But I see that as a net positive because I think it’s tied to the demand — the underlying demand for the products, and it helps us with predictability and capacity planning. So for me, it’s a positive in terms of how we’re managing and scaling the business.

David Mulholland: Did you have a quick follow-up, Richard?

Richard Kramer: For Marco — yes, please. A quick one for Marco. Given the working capital buildup, the employee incentives, the EUR 750 million to EUR 850 million of pending CapEx to your EUR 900 million to EUR 1 billion expectation, restructuring and so on, will year-end cash be materially lower than what we see now? It just feels like you have a lot of cash constraints or drains on the business in the next 2 to 3 quarters.

Marco Wiren: Yes. Thank you. Yes. Just like you said, we had a very good cash generation in quarter 1 and quarter 2 is lower. But we do generate cash continuously year-by-year as well, and we are also securing that we have a very good cash position to have the freedom to make decisions that we need to do, of course, always allowing us to follow the capital allocation principles that we have in the company, that first priority is on R&D. And then secondly is to find other investments inorganic that could support our growth and then dividend. And if we deem to have excess capital, then we can consider share buybacks as well. But we are quite confident about our cash position.

David Mulholland: Thanks Richard. We’ll take our next question from Felix Henriksson from Nordea.

Felix Henriksson: Congrats for a strong order quarter. Given the unprecedented demand in AI and cloud, and also the supply-constrained market environment across the sector, is pricing something that’s contributing to your guidance upgrade in Optical and IP? Are you starting to see support from raising prices for that?

Justin Hotard: Yes. Felix, thanks for that. Maybe I’ll comment, Marco, you may want to add. But I think in general, what we see is if you look at Optical, you’ve actually got — structurally, you’ve got a cost curve that’s probably coming down, which is enabling scaling. And so I would say, in general, we don’t see — is not a contribution on pricing, it’s much more unit volume. What I will say is that I think we acknowledge that there are some cases where pricing is going up. I mean memory has been talked about quite a bit as a structural pivot. And that’s a place where we have some exposure across the business. And obviously, we’re working with customers on that because in our minds, that’s something that’s structural that we’re — in some cases, we’re passing on.

In other cases, we’re also working on things like redesigning our products, right? But again, those are focuses that we’re working on mitigating. And then — but in general, I would say, if you look at the growth, it’s much more volume driven than it is price driven.

Marco Wiren: And just building on that, if you think the new launches that we introduced also in the OFC, the main focus is power of the bid. So how can we improve the power of the bid for our customers because that’s one of the main KPIs they have, so helping them to improve their cost base.

David Mulholland: Did you have a quick follow-up, Felix?

Felix Henriksson: Yes. Just a quick one. I’m not sure if I missed it already, but can you just comment on how long the lead times between getting the order to actual revenues in Optical are at the moment? Just trying to get a sense of the EUR 1 billion incremental AI and cloud orders for Q1, whether or not those will already support 2026 or more so for 2027?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I don’t think we gave you a specific one, Felix. But I think dimensioning probably for this — for the broader demand that we see is like in this — in the Optical space is 12 to 18 months. I mean there’s — as you know, there’s always exceptions in these things where some things might be sooner depending on the specific product, but that’s probably a good way to think about the broader lead times we’re seeing today.

David Mulholland: Thanks, Felix. We’ll take our next question from Sandeep Deshpande from JPMorgan. Sandeep, please go ahead. Sandeep, we can’t hear you.

Operator: I just find this, perhaps your line in on mute.

Sandeep Deshpande: My first question is regarding the switching business of Nokia. You — on the Optical side, you probably have all the hyperscalers as customers at this point. You announced in the past few quarters wins on switches at multiple hyperscalers. Would you suggest at this point that you have a fairly broad exposure in terms of at least what is the future design win activity or future shipments at all the hyperscalers? Or is it still very limited to 1 or 2 hyperscalers in terms of your switching business?

Justin Hotard: I don’t know if I’ll give you that much dimensioning, Sandeep, but I would say that as you look at the AI and cloud customer base — the macro AI and cloud customer base, there’s quite — there’s a set of different strategies that each one pursues. And I’d say the places where we get traction is where our portfolio fits our strategy is probably the best way to give you the answer.

David Mulholland: Did you have a quick follow-up, Sandeep?

Sandeep Deshpande: Is it broader today than it was, say, a year ago, the customer base?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I think it’s — yes, I guess I don’t quite measure it that way. I’m looking more at the design wins in the footprint. And I think that’s certainly broader based on what we see today than it was a year ago.

Sandeep Deshpande: And I have a quick follow-up on the financials. Marco, I mean, well before your time, I mean, Nokia in the past in terms of merger, M&A has — in terms of integration has had problems. Clearly, at this point, you have tremendous growth. So that is helping the top line very significantly. But has the company got a structured process in place such that in terms of the integration with Infinera that this underlying doesn’t have any issues going in the mid- to long term? And then secondly, given that there is a new fab ramping up as well later this year, are there any risks associated with that later in the year, given typically with semiconductor fab ramp-ups that can have issues?

Marco Wiren: Yes. First of all, if you look at the integration, as I mentioned earlier as well that we are tracking extremely well on that compared to our own targets and also what we guided the Street. And we’ve been actually doing it better than we expected. So the team is extremely focused on securing the integration, and speed is extremely important here. So I understand your comment on the past perhaps, but this is definitely going well, and we’re extremely happy with the progress. Do you want to…

Justin Hotard: Yes, maybe I’ll just add on that. I would just say, Sandeep, two things. One is, I think if you look underneath this, even if you took the growth out, I think you’d see very solid execution on the integration. I think the team has done really well. One of the most important things in integration that’s a driver of outcome is cultural. And when you — one thing that was clear to me when I went to OFC was, I could not — everybody was Nokia — was a member of Team Nokia. There wasn’t an Infinera Nokia team, it was one team. That’s hugely important, right, for being successful. The two other comments I’ll make here is one acquisition, as you well know, does not a trend make in terms of successful execution and integration.

So we have more work to do before we decide we’re effective at this. And it’s something that with the focus we put under the Chief Corporate Development Officer, Konstanty, obviously, one is making sure we find the right business for — the right place for our portfolio businesses. Two is obviously being smart with how we think about capital allocation in terms of M&A where we believe that’s accretive to our strategy. And then three is making sure we actually execute the integration. So that’s a place where I’m pleased with the work that he and the team are doing, obviously, in close partnership with Marco, with our Chief People Officer, with all the key functions and the business presidents. But there’s a journey here. And I think the net here is Infinera has been a good one.

We need to get the learnings on that and then make sure we also don’t forget the lessons from some of the challenges we’ve had in the past.

Marco Wiren: And then when it comes to the manufacturing, remember that Indium phosphide is quite different compared to silicon manufacturing. So this is, first of all, much lower CapEx needed, but also it’s faster. And I think that our team is working extremely well and understanding based on the learnings also from the Fab 1, we are transferring those into the Fap 2 and very good learnings from Fab 1. I don’t know, Justin, if you want to say something more.

Justin Hotard: Yes. I would just say our guide — the only thing I would add is I think our guidance is risk balance understanding — contemplating that ramp. And the reality is Fab 2 is a fraction of the ramp for ’26, it’s much more material to the longer term.

David Mulholland: Thanks Sandeep. We’ll take our next question from Jakob Bluestone from BNP Paribas. Jakob, please go ahead.

Jakob Bluestone: So I had a question on the sort of margin progression as your IP revenues scale. I mean you’ve put through a sizable increase in your revenue guidance for some of the components for NI, but it’s a sort of more modest change in your language at the group level. So if you can maybe just help us understand for IP in particular, as that business starts to accelerate, is it a bit like what we’ve seen on Optical, where initially it’s perhaps not quite as accretive to margins? And then as that business starts to gain scale, it becomes a lot more margin accretive as well. So just if you can help us sort of understand the drivers there.

Justin Hotard: I think the way I think about it, Jakob, is — I think probably like any business, there’s a scaling effect, right? I guess for me, the big focus right now is on capturing the opportunity and making sure it’s accretive profit into the company. that’s the priority. I don’t know, Marco, if you’d add anything.

Marco Wiren: No, it’s — always when you’re starting with the new products, it takes some time to get the profitability up, and that’s why we also mentioned that we see some impact of that in NII for first half of this year. But just like Justin said, that these are definitely accretive to our operating profit, and we see good opportunities there.

Jakob Bluestone: As like San Jose…

David Mulholland: Thanks Jakob. Go ahead Jakob…

Jakob Bluestone: So I just had a quick follow-up. Just on the San Jose fab, can you maybe just help us understand, I don’t know if there’s any way to quantify whether that will cover your internal needs from the outset or not?

Justin Hotard: Yes. I mean I think as we’ve talked about, San Jose gives us support. Certainly support for the growth that we see and expansion capacity for us as well beyond the portfolio that we have today and the volume that we see in the market. So that doesn’t mean that we won’t look at ways to accelerate — further accelerate capacity because as we said, we think long term, this is a structural market, and we’re pretty uniquely positioned as one of the few manufacturers with indium phosphide manufacturing capability at scale. But we think that too gives us — certainly gives us the runway for the near term.

David Mulholland: Thanks, Jakob. We’ll take our next question from Sébastien Sztabowicz from Kepler. Sébastien, please go ahead.

Sébastien Sztabowicz: The main opportunity for Nokia remains get across with optical line system and your pluggable optics. But I’m just curious, have you seen any specific opportunity building up around co-packaged optic or near package optics because the market seems to be quite bullish or there are a lot of demand building up these days.

Justin Hotard: Yes. I think on that side, we’ve not made any announcements there. We’ve demonstrated — at OFC, we demonstrated some technology development, but no announcements at this time.

Sébastien Sztabowicz: Okay. And a follow-up on Infinera and the synergies. Previously, you were talking about maybe generating the EUR 200 million synergies in 2026 instead of ’27. Are you still on track with that? And attached to this question, given the accelerated investment, is it fair to assume still a nice improvement of margin in Optical Networks this year or not?

Marco Wiren: Yes. Thank you, Sébastien. Yes, the synergy, as I said earlier, we are tracking very well and a little bit ahead of our schedule. We originally said that it will take 3 years from the closing. And we said that we are tracking somewhat better than that. And we see the impact of synergies already in our quarterly reports as well. Just like in quarter 1, we mentioned that Infinera acquisition synergies are benefiting Optical business, and we will see those throughout the year as well.

David Mulholland: Thanks Sébastien. We’ll take our next question from Oliver Wong from Bank of America. Oliver, please go ahead.

Oliver Wong: I had a question on — going back to the Q1 AI orders and just your backlog and AI orders in general. I guess, so you mentioned that the lead times in Optical and I think IP are 12 to 18 months currently, but you also significantly increased your growth assumptions for this year for Optical and IP. So I was wondering, are these orders even though the lead times are up to 18 months are — is much of this still quite kind of near-term loaded? And also in terms of the IP growth expected this year, I presume that most of that is from switch business. But you mentioned kind of big design wins and then that translating into orders starting next quarter. So are a lot of these design wins expected to kind of translate into revenues this year?

Justin Hotard: I think as we touched on some of the design wins will start ramping this year. And yes, and I should clarify, we talked a little bit about Optical being 12 to 18 months. I think you’ve heard other peers in the industry talk or some of the players — the ecosystem peers talk about being sold out over multiple years. I think that’s probably a pretty good indication of where we see the Optical side. IP is a little bit shorter, but I would say there’s parts of that supply chain that have constraints. And so obviously, we work closely with customers on forecasting and planning. And as we said, the only thing we register are the actual purchase orders themselves. That’s what you’ll see translated to orders.

David Mulholland: Thanks, Oliver. We’ll take our last question this morning from Emil Immonen from DNB Carnegie. Emil, please go ahead.

Emil Immonen: So, I have a question on…

David Mulholland: We can barely hear you. Your line is very hard to hear.

Emil Immonen: Can you hear me now?

David Mulholland: Yes, that’s a bit better.

Emil Immonen: Yes. So the growth you’re saying the 27% market growth that you’re now seeing instead of 16%. Could you comment on, is that volume or is that price-driven?

Justin Hotard: It’s volume driven.

Emil Immonen: Okay. In that case, given the Fab 2 coming online at the end of this year, does that mean that you’re building a third fab maybe? Because I think previously, you said that you were planning your current capacity to the earlier growth you were seeing in demand.

Justin Hotard: Yes. I think one thing we’ve — maybe just to clarify in case we haven’t clarified in the past, Fab 2, when we shared in November, what we talked about was Fab 2 being able to be sufficient to meet the demands of the guidance we provided, and there was additional capacity on top. Obviously, we’re not making any announcements about additional manufacturing capacity at this time. But that’s the way I would think about it is that in the prior guidance, there was excess capacity and ability to build. I would take the — if you kind of stitch the conversation together, I’ll stitch it together for you. We’re making additional investments that probably means that we’re — part of what we’re doing there is investing in ramping Fab 2 at scale.

And again, it’s not just the fab, it’s all the components of the supply chain because that fab produces a critical component, which is the optical component, but there’s also a DSP, there’s other components in our pluggables, and there’s also many other components in our subsystems from the ecosystem. So all of that factors into this.

David Mulholland: And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining us today. This concludes today’s call. I would like to remind you that during the call today, we have made a number of forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may, therefore, differ materially from the results currently expected. 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. Thank you all.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect your devices.