Pacific Crest’s James Faucette this morning reiterates a Sector Perform rating on shares of Nokia (NOK) and a €2 to €3 “fair value range” on the ordinary shares traded in Helsinki, writing that the stock’s recent run-up is based on an overly optimistic reading of recent sales data for its “Lumia” phones based on Microsoft‘s (MSFT) Windows Phone software, while his own checks suggest the sales have been not strong at all.
We believe that the recent rise in the stock may have been driven by what we would characterize as an overly optimistic in-terpretation of initial Lumia sales commentary. Back in mid-November, Bloomberg cited the rise in NOK1V shares as being driven by reports that the Lumia 920 had seen strong demand in Germany. While this may have been the case for a few thousand initial units, our checks indicate that retailers in Germany say they are only now beginning to receive the 920 across normal sales channels, and the volumes being received are still very small. We believe there is some initial pent-up demand that is resulting in stores selling out of initial shipments in a few days. Nevertheless, we believe this is largely to do with the low shipment volumes rather than surprisingly strong demand. We believe a somewhat similar dynamic is likely going on at AT&T for the 920. Based on the inventory on hand, we believe AT&T is selling only 10,000 to 15,000 Lumia 920 devices per week at the moment. We believe stores are able to sell available stock in a few days; however, we found most stores getting only a handful at a time. We estimate that the company is tracking toward shipping roughly 1 million new Windows 8 products in the December quarter, while it looks likely to sell-through roughly half of those units, based on current run rates.
