EuroWire November 2015

Transatlantic cable

governments worldwide striving to train and keep more highly skilled developers and engineers to serve the needs of their quickly digitising economies. Mr Scott noted that British politicians are investing heavily in computer training for teenagers; French policymakers are pushing coding as a potential solution to the country’s economic problems; and many Americans are rebooting their careers to tap into the growing number of tech jobs. Meanwhile Finland – with a population roughly the same as that of the USA state of Minnesota – has a surplus of highly trained tech workers, made redundant in the Nokia-Microsoft transition. A team e ort gets results That many of the former employees have made a comparatively soft landing in fairly dire circumstances is attributable largely to a timely e ort by the Finnish government. As Nokia began to lay o employees, politicians introduced government grants, entrepreneurship programmes, and other training to help laid-o workers to start their own companies. In a concurrent development, companies outside Finland opened o ces there, attracted by the available tech talent. “Finnish politicians have also forced Nokia – and are putting pressure on Microsoft – to support former employees’ re-entry into the labour market,” Mr Scott reported. That help includes one-o grants for new business ventures and permission for former employees to use some of the companies’ intellectual property, such as unwanted patents, almost free of charge. Olli Rehn, the Finnish minister of economic a airs, acknowledged in an interview with the Times that both Nokia and Microsoft “have shown substantial responsibility in mitigating the impact of the layo s.” Owing to these various initiatives, said Mr Rehn: “Finland remains a stronghold for the global tech industry.” † Taking the endeavour a step further, several of the Finnish cities most a ected by the big job cuts have pushed to attract other tech companies, using the available local tech talent as a major selling point. Mr Scott noted that ARM Holdings, the British designer of digital products, and MediaTek, the Taiwanese semiconductor company, have recently set up research and development facilities in Oulu, in the far north of Finland. They are hiring teams of former Nokia engineers. † According to government o cials and national statistics, as a result of the mitigation e orts the unemployment rate for Finland’s tech workers is several percentage points lower than the current ten per cent unemployment rate for the nation as a whole. Elsewhere in telecom . . . † The Financial Times reported (23 rd August) that a BT Group o cial had called for the United States to require its telecommunications companies to allow access to their networks at regulated prices, as per rules in place in the United Kingdom. BT is the country’s main provider. Bas Burger, president of the British company’s Americas unit, told the London newspaper that a lack of regulation has hampered competition in the USA, where AT&T and Verizon Communications control some 80 per cent of the telephone and broadband lines serving businesses and homes. He said BT Group must charge its customers more to cover the large fees paid to the USA telecoms for data transmission over those wires.

A concurrent, nationwide, development suggests that the economics of solar power generation likewise are becoming more favourable. According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), the installed price for grid-connected solar PV systems has dropped in the USA for the fth consecutive year. The DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, reported that national median installed prices in 2014 declined year-over-year by nine per cent for residential systems, by ten per cent for non-residential systems less than or equal to 500 kilowatts (kW), and by 21 per cent for non-residential systems higher than 500kW. Installed prices continued to fall over the rst six months of 2015, with an eight per cent decrease for residential systems, a 13 per cent decrease for non-residential systems less than or equal to 500kW, and a six per cent decrease for non-residential systems higher than 500kW. As noted by digital reporter Greg Watry of R&D Magazine (Rockaway, New Jersey), the DOE report attributes these price declines to dropping “soft costs” rather than to lower prices for solar modules, which in fact have remained relatively steady since 2012. Soft costs include such items as “marketing and customer acquisition, system design, installation labour, permitting and inspection costs, and installer margins.” According to the DOE report, reductions in these costs are due in part to steady increases in system size and module e ciency, “although [they] likely also re ect a broad and sustained emphasis within industry and among policymakers on addressing soft costs.” In its care for workers laid o in the wake of the takeover of Nokia by Microsoft of the USA, Finland does well by doing good When, in August 2013, Nokia agreed to sell its handset business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion, the Finnish company’s lost dominance of the global mobile phone market was viewed at home as a tragedy but not a mystery. In simplest terms, the pace-setting and adaptive rm whose market capitalisation had dwindled to a fth of where it stood in 2007 was crushed by Apple and Android, also USA-based. Nokia now focuses almost exclusively on its telecom infrastructure business. In the Finland of 2015, the Nokia story is no longer solely a cautionary tale, although troubles stemming from the sale persist. Last year, within three months of nalising its acquisition of the mobile phone business, Microsoft announced 18,000 layo s, many of them in Finland. And the end is not yet. Microsoft (Redmond, Washington) said it would reduce its Finnish work force by up to 2,300 employees, or roughly two-thirds of its local work force. Writing in the New York Times , Mark Scott took note of this fast in ux of unemployed tech workers into the Finnish economy and acknowledged that it has left policymakers in Helsinki with a headache. But, he wrote, it is a headache “that many of their counterparts elsewhere would most likely welcome.” (“After Nokia Layo s, Tech Workers in Finland Regroup and Refocus,” 9 th August) The apparent paradox is explained by the exponential growth of smartphones, apps, and the mobile Internet, which has Telecom

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November 2015