Texas Instruments Avoids Nokia Hangman For Now (TXN, NOK, ERIC)

Texas Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ: TXN) is trading up so far with the broader equity and technology markets.  The question which needs to be asked is “Should it really be up?”…

The warnings out of Nokia Corporation (NYSE: NOK) this morning were pretty harsh as the company continues to get crowded out.  Texas Instruments has suffered from Nokia’s woes before as it is a key customer of TI’s chipsets.  You cannot always draw a straight line between the two because TI does have other large customers as well.  That being said, it happened just in 2011 where Nokia’s woes translated directly to a hit in TI’s earnings.  As of last summer, ZDnet noted that Nokia was 10% to 20% of TI’s revenues.

It is almost surprising that Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) is not lower as well as its shares are up 2.2% at $9.78 in New York trading.  Earlier this year there had been warnings that Ericsson could be impacted by declining sales of Nokia’s legacy Symbian smartphones.

Nokia shares have recovered some off of their lows, but the stock is still at a decade low of $4.33 after a 14% drop on a whopping 87 million shares after just over an hour of trading.

Texas Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ: TXN) is up 1.2% at $32.09 against a 52-week range of $24.34 to $35.98.  Maybe this time will be different.  Maybe.

JON C. OGG