- Nokia's CEO Justin Hotard said that 2025 was "foundational" for the company
- The RAN market is "stable" as Nokia preps its first AI-RAN gear, he noted
- The vendor is still devoted to its mission-critical approach to larger private network deals, although it is deciding what to do with its enterprise campus unit
Nokia’s CEO said that last year was a formative year for the vendor, as it acquired Infinera to support optical networking for the AI supercycle, saw strong demand from AI and cloud customers, observed a stable RAN market and prepared to potentially move away from smaller private network deployments.
“2025 was a foundational year in repositioning Nokia for long-term value creation,” said CEO Justin Hotard on the firm’s earnings call this morning.
RAN market roundabout
After a few bad years in the cellular RAN market, Nokia CFO Marco Wirén said that the market is now relatively stable. “In 2026, we will see some headwinds in North America in the radio access network side considering the customer loss that we had and that will have an impact, otherwise marketwise we see quite stable growth in the radio market,” he noted. Particularly he expected that the sales situation in India may improve over the year.
Hotard said that the company's first trial AI-RAN gear will start to arrive this year after signing an investment deal with Nvidia in Q4 last year. “We continue to remain on track to begin trials and proof-of-contract for AI-RAN later this year,” Hotard said.
On the enterprise side
Hotard said on the earnings call today that mission-critical private networking and RAN will grow in 2026. This includes deals in the public safety, railway and defense space.
Like Ericsson, Nokia sees the defense space growing. The CEO noted that Nokia had created Nokia Defense to address this market, which includes Nokia Federal Solutions in the U.S. “Based on feedback from customers we see growing demand for our 4G and 5G technology from military customers,” Hotard said.
At its capital markets day, Nokia moved 4 units — which included the enterprise campus private network unit, as well as its microwave radio unit, site operations business and fixed wireless access customer unit — into a portfolio business with a view to potentially selling any or all of them.
Hotard said that the portfolio businesses made net sales of €850 million and an operating loss of €97 million. “In 2026, our target is to conclude a future direction for each of them,” Hotard said.
The numbers
Nokia reported net sales up 3% of €6.1 ($7.3 billion) annually with an operating profit of €1.06 billion ($1.3 billion). The vendor reported full-year sales of €19.9B ($23.8 billion) with an operating profit of €2 billion ($2.4 billion).
Nokia’s shares were down 10.48% on the results at $6.11 today at the time of publication.