Together we win or LOSE !!!

Yesterday a colleague shared an interesting article with me.  It is about Nokia, a past giant in telecom industry. It shows how a bad choice of partner or below par performance from your alliance can lead to loss.
5G networks are complex. It´s not possible for any company to produce them on their own. They have to get supplies and parts from other partners. In this article we see Nokia doing well in the beginning. They make the right calls and acquire rival business from Alcatel-Lucent. They had to take a strategic call for their 5G products and had to choose between two options.

• A flexible FPGA solution
• A program specific ASIC solution

Nokia went ahead with the first solution in the hope of reduced time to market as ASICs have their own design and fabrication lead time. Nokia decided to go ahead with the first solution.

Eventually, it turned out that the supplier for FPGA failed to meet the performance requirements promised. Furthermore it couldn´t keep the unit costs down leading to financial worries for Nokia. When the news was out, we can see in the picture below how the share price flopped.   

Nokia's Share Price in Helsinki Since October 21

(Source: Yahoo Finance)

The questions are:

• Did Nokia do the requite homework before their choice of FPGA solution and eventual vendor decision?
• Was the risk and benefit management process followed before taking such strategic decision?
• What is the plan to get back in the game?

Reference:
(1). https://www.lightreading.com/mobile/5g/nokias-5g-chip-choice-leaves-it-exposed/d/d-id/755184