Memoirs of a Bloomberg Reporter Covering the World’s Largest Mobile Device Maker
I had the unexpected pleasure of as a Finn cover a Finnish tech firm as Europe’s most valuable company. This at a renegade financial technology firm that would reshape the entire global financial services market.
Nokia, the Finnish network equipment maker, was the largest mobile device maker in the world and Europe’s most valuable firm. Because of this, the Bloomberg Helsinki bureau was considered the firm’s second-most important European office while being one of the smallest on the continent. But whenever news broke on Nokia, it was on top of Bloomberg’s global front page. And most often it moved equity markets from Tokyo to New York.
Early Days
When I was first hired in Stockholm, and Nokia was starting its ascent to the top of corporate Europe, Bloomberg was still a two-person exercise in the Nordics with one person in Copenhagen and one in Stockholm. It was the clear underdog to all established players such as Dow Jones and Reuters, not to mention local players such as Dagens Industri’s Direkt and Sanoma’s Startel (both now gone because of Bloomberg).
But Bloomberg had clout and drive. It housed an entire building on Finsbury Square in the heart of London from where it harboured ambitions to win over Europe. While still early in its efforts, this winning attitude was clearly felt at the London office. Little did I know then that both Bloomberg and my native Nokia would both become the biggest players in their respective fields.
We started by summarising local newspapers in Stockholm and calling analysts and traders for short market summaries. While yesterday’s news, we were the first to get the summaries out every morning, our clients being mostly abroad without access to local newspapers. While it was a task that didn’t feel meaningful at first, the electric startup mentality at Bloomberg was captivating. There wasn’t a week when the firm wasn’t testing something new and moving forward.
Beginning to Scale
Little by little we started to gain pace. Soon we opened the Helsinki office, first a small room in Startel’s cellar on Ludviginkatu and later a stand-alone office on Aleksanterinkatu, the Wall Street equivalent in Helsinki, where we did our first full-time hires.
There, we also started building on our systems, first relying on stock exchange data through a third-party feed but then connecting our own servers to a proprietary line at the Helsinki stock exchange. This was when we began rivalling the established players in speed and when everything started to change. The server rooms began to grow.
The first mode of action in news production was the so-called EDIT function on the Bloomberg Terminal. Through it, you could send out the one-lined headlines that traders eyes were glued on and which actually moved markets. The most important tidbits that we believed would move stocks were released using it.
At first, I called the headlines to an editor in London or Stockholm, but soon we realized that we wouldn’t win if we didn’t produce the headlines locally. Headlines were considered the most dangerous piece of market publishing because traders acted on them immediately. Any wrong detail would lead to equally wrong moves at the trading desks. Missteps could costs clients millions.
Surfing on Nokia
What’s more, Nokia was growing to become one of the handful of companies in the world that moved global indexes as mobile phone demand was seen as an early indicator of global economic health. Billions were at play as not only Nokia traders started to buy on signals from the firm. Sending out a red sticky on Nokia — a red headline that appeared on every Bloomberg users screen and stayed there for 10 seconds – was an adrenaline rush equivalent to base jumping.
You had seconds to find the most important detail from pages of mostly unscheduled stock exchange reports and send it while making the judgement call whether it was worth a red sticky or not. Any mistake on a red headline risked ruining your career.
At that time, Bloomberg was growing in importance so much so that Nokia’s management started to pay attention to us. While Nokia’s fabled CEO Jorma Ollila continued to give his post-earnings television interviews only to CNBC, we soon got their CFO to comment on Bloomberg Television. Now, the rivals who we previously summarised had to cite us for their news items.
Winning
We began to keep a daily record on who was the fastest in putting out their headlines and slowly but surely Bloomberg started to climb on the rankings, soon to become the benchmark for fastest market intelligence on Nokia and beyond. We had won the sprint race.
But Bloomberg didn’t only want to be the fastest, it also wanted to be the final and future word. It wanted to replace the analyst, to produce articles that were of such quality and forward-looking to the degree that they could replace most analysts.
Bloomberg started to poll equity analysts for earnings estimates and posted them under the ANR function. This slowly grew to become the market consensus for earnings expectations. If a company’s profit came in above the number, its stock rose. And vice versa. We interviewed analysts ahead of the earnings to get two opposing views and pasted the one that better fit the actual number post-earnings. We called these “canned quotes.”
Superpowers
With a little training, we got a full four-screen story out only minutes after our first headline. The report was pre-written to the extent of just adding the actual numbers and deleting the paragraphs that didn’t pan out. Sometimes we led with quotes from Finnish fund managers but most often with some of the most colourful hedge fund managers of the world. Being so fast and accurate, traders thought we had superpowers until I told them about the actual process.
This of course wasn’t without its dangers either as when Bloomberg in February 2022 published a news item about Russia invading Ukraine, 19 days before it actually happened.
In time, we started to produce news reports that were of such high quality that leading financial outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times just copied our articles as they were. Reporters started to interview reporters on Bloomberg Television as they grew to become as good as, if not sometimes better than, most investment bank analysts.
To make this even more difficult to distinguish, Bloomberg started to hire dedicated data analysts at its office in Princeton, and later locally. They would leverage on the unparallelled financial data that Bloomberg was accumulating. Hence, it comes as little surprise that Bloomberg was the first to train a large language model on financial data, in effect killing the stock analyst profession.
Nokia’s Fall and Upcoming Rise
Nokia’s success and the growth mindset at Bloomberg were the main reasons for me to stay at the firm. A sometimes intoxicating combination. But Nokia’s shine was about to fade. When I met the management team at Nokia’s lavish Keilaniemi headquarters one hot summer day, sporting just shorts and a tee-shirt, I asked why they hadn’t made a product that merged my Nokia 6020 with my Palm E2. Fitting both in my shorts was impossible.
The management said their research showed that there wasn’t any demand for a touch-screen mobile phone. The market for early adopters such as me, which was how they put it, wasn’t big enough. Not much later, the iPhone proved otherwise. Apple’s Steve Jobs didn’t listen to the consumers. Instead, he built products that people didn’t know they wanted. This, and Nokia’s 8.1 billion-dollar acquisition of mapmaker Navteq, started to erode my confidence in the firm. This is when I first considered leaving Bloomberg as Nokia’s world-beating attitude wasn’t there anymore. It had also turned aloof.
But Bloomberg has continued to go from strength to strength. And while Nokia lost its sexy mobile device business to Microsoft, it is still a power player in the radio access network business which connects your iPhone, the product that killed Nokia phones, to the internet. In the ongoing geopolitical reshuffle, and Finland’s ascension to NATO, the fact of who actually controls the internet may soon become sexy again.
Few firms in the world can offer the continuing job excitement as Bloomberg can. Every time I think it is stumbling, the company picks itself up and reinvents itself again.
This article is to celebrate my 15th year away from an experience that won’t likely be offered to any other Finn. Ever. Unless there will be a Finnish firm on top of Europe again.
I wrote the below article five years ago to juxtapose the work processes within journalism and venture capital. The story has thus far been read more than 7,000 times, which must include every VC aspiring journalist.
