Nokia Siemens CEO: Taking the Company from Crisis to Complexity

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS — "3G will have a very long life.  It's only likely to peak around 2020."

That's Rajeev Suri, CEO at Nokia Siemens Networks, talking about market development and his company's turnaround at the press and analyst briefing in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress on Monday.

When it comes to data growth, "it doesn't really matter what these numbers are," he added. "We know they will be huge. The data rate will explode. That's not new news anymore. Frankly it's boring news by now. While competitors have focused on volume, we've tuned into concentrating on complexity."

NSN's message today revolved around the general theme of "what a difference a year makes," with Suri running through financial metrics and key market wins (25 new 3G customers, 193 WCDMA customers total, 31 commercial LTE contracts to date) and not sugarcoating the crisis that the company was in a little more than a year ago.

"Our cost base was too high," he noted. "Our bottom line was under extreme pressure. Our product roadmaps were off base. Many in the industry were wondering if we would survive. We were wondering if we would survive."

But NSN has emerged from the recession in better shape "since the founding of our company four years ago," he noted, with key areas of interest and growth: mobile broadband, managed services and subscriber-centric services. The company continues to grow faster than the market, particularly in the BRIC countries. The ongoing Motorola acquisition, which should close by the end of Q1, will be leveraged to accelerate that growth, particularly in terms of infrastucture footprint within the United States, and in Japan. The latter country represents a "remarkable success story," Suri said, with NSN experiencing 141 percent growth. Right now NSN is the No. 2 foreign vendor in that country – and will likely end up as No 1 after the Moto deal closes.

In terms of work to do going forward, Suri noted that NSN's business solutions suite fell short of its expectations and getting that back on track will be "among our top priorities in 2011." A new push toward TD-LTE, continued improvements in 3G and 4G speeds and latency, and subscriber experience management round out the agenda for the vendor.

Independently tested by Signals Research, NSN has achieved a 102.1mbps downlink on TeliaSonera's commercial LTE network in Gothenburg, Sweden (it launched in December boasting 90mbps). That's versus 95.6mbps in Ericsson's LTE deployment in Stockholm, representing a +7 percent competitive advantage, he noted. For the averages, NSN is 46 percent speedier on average than Ericsson, he added – 39.3mbps down vs. 26.9mbps for Ericsson.

But it's not just about speeds and feeds, as it were. "We believe how radio resources are utilized becomes absolutely critical as more users come onto the network," he said.

The reality of multiple access networks, multitasking devices and skyrocketing complexity has resulted in the Golden Cluster program, which combines services and products into a single program to optimize networks for smart devices with an advanced, flat IP architecture.

Then there's the customer experience. "If you want to know where operators are going to spend more money, just look to the customer experience. And an overwhelming majority of operators list this as their top priority."

Churn is getting expensive and customers seem ever-willing to swap out their operator when they feel unsatisfied, Suri noted. "The typical approach is to say, 'stay with us and we'll give you a better smartphone. In reality, we should focus on delivering a better user experience, every day."