Nokia Annual General Meeting 2019: €0.05 first instalment of dividend, 5G is now and resolving the pay gap
The Annual General Meeting (AGM further in the text) of Nokia Corporation was held in Helsinki today (21.5.2019). All the important heads of Nokia gathered in one place to discuss the state of the company and the future course of action.
Nokia’s CEO, Rajeev Suri, spoke at the meeting and gave insight into what Nokia was doing for the past year. He also shared the outlooks for the current fiscal year. According to Mr. Suri, Nokia finally took some efforts to resolve the statistically significant pay gap in the company that can’t be explained by factors such as performance, experience, job grade, or location. This was a huge problem during the past decade, and Nokia is now going to become one of the few companies that have undertaken this kind of effort. Mr. Suri also mentioned that Nokia wasn’t so fast in delivering the 5G solution, and he puts the blame on the acquisition of the Alcatel Lucent and differences in the 5G strategies of those two companies. However, he also mentioned that the sales of 5G solutions are at its highest point right now. Nokia currently has 37 5G commercial contracts, and 20 of those are with customers like T-Mobile, AT&T, STC, and Telia. At the MWC19, we could witness that Nokia created a great end-to-end portfolio, and customers are obviously satisfied with the performance of Nokia powered networks.
Nokia also continued investing a lot in the development of green and sustainable products with the main goal of reducing the carbon emission to the atmosphere. They recently launched the industry’s first-ever liquid-cooled base station that emits 80% less CO2.
Nokia also decided to pay out €0.05 dividend as first instalment of the announced €0.20 dividend.
In an assembly meeting that took place after the AGM the Board resolved under the authorization by the Annual General Meeting to distribute a dividend of EUR 0.05 per share from the retained earnings. The dividend record date is on May 23, 2019 and the dividend is expected to be paid on or about June 6, 2019. The actual dividend pay date outside Finland will be determined by the practices of the intermediary banks transferring the dividend payments. Following this announced distribution, the remaining distribution authorization of the Board is EUR 0.15 per share.
The new Board of Directors members were elected at the AGM meeting, and the Board now consists of the following people: Sari Baldauf, Bruce Brown, Jeanette Horan, Edward Kozel, Elizabeth Nelson, Olivier Piou, Risto Siilasmaa, Carla Smits-Nusteling, and Kari Stadigh. The Board has chosen Risto Siilasmaa again to be the Chair of the Board. If you are interested in the members of the Board, you can find out more about them by visiting Nokia pages here.
The AGM meeting showed that Nokia is in an interesting period right now since the 5G is not the future anymore, but rather a reality that is happening right now. Finns are going to be helping a lot of operators grasp the potential of the 5G networks, and this is going to make them a leader in the industry. The shares jumped at the market which is a good thing for all the investors looking at Nokia. Things that are happening to Huawei lately are surely going to help Nokia, but also create some space for competitors like Ericsson and others, so Nokia should be careful there. This year will set their future position in the networking market.
