How does that make sense? Nokia was in serious trouble before Elop got there and Android was already well established elsewhere.

Nokia stocks has risen ~40% in the last year. You call that sinking?

Aug 29 2012: 2.75 Aug 29 2013: 3.97

Compare that to Apple.

According to Yahoo Finance, it was 10.06 on the NYSE the day before he became the CEO. Went up a bit to 11.06 a couple of times in the next two quarters, but otherwise not good, and 3.94 in pre-market trading today.

That is not completely fair, though. At the time of his arrival Nokia was a desperately sinking ship. The price would drop before rising no matter what direction the company took at the time.

At the time of his arrival, Nokia was a stagnating dinosaur, with a tiny bit of hope in an innovative operating system that was mismanaged, buggy, and couldn't ship on time. Elop accidentally announced that they were discontinuing support on horrible Symbian, which was at the time the most popular smartphone operating system in the world, and turned Nokia into a desperately sinking ship.

Elop wasn't the worst CEO possible, but he was the worst CEO available.

That's why I gave an overview of the behavior starting with him becoming CEO. He got a couple of quarters of flat stock prices, perhaps suggesting investors were giving him a chance to show he was turning it around, and after that it's essentially all downhill.

Look at the last 5 years, you can't really paint it as hopeful right now: http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=NOK+Interactive#symbol=no...

You mean a sunk ship is rising - 40%! ? What percentage of the mobile market does Nokia have? Hint: Was Samsung selling anything 5 years ago in this market? Not to mention QT is having a tough time.

If I was on a sinking ship that suddenly began to rise when a new captain took the helm, I would consider the captain to be doing a pretty decent job.

First sentence of the article:

"...Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop, who has presided over a 62 percent decline in market value..."

See my other comment in this subthread: it rose a bit, then sunk a whole lot. That it's up from its nadir $1.71 a bit more than a year ago is cold comfort when it was doing around $9 3 years ago summer through spring 2011.

Nokia is like a ship with a hole in it, and Elop's job is to get it pointed in the right direction.

Except he hasn't. He's just bailed water a little faster, and slightly reduced the sink rate.

I give them credit for doing something daring and different (betting on Windows when they knew noone else would). It was a big gamble, though, and at least so far, it hasn't paid off. Android would have been a far safer bet in the short-term at the very least.

Aug 29 2013: 3.97 Aug 29, 2011: 6.03. You call that rising?

Why? To finish the job of killing Microsoft?