Also, as a part of the process, we have, of course, brought the opinions of our currently largest shareholders. There are quite many institutions from Finland, like Mandatum Life, Kaleva, Varma, Ilmarinen. And, from these people, we got confirmation that this is something that probably should happen. They feel that this is better than to wait with the company for a couple of more years and see what is going to happen. Good prospects, but higher risks in the future. So our recommendation was based on that. Also, one might note that, the management of the company, especially Juhani, and all the board members, they are all major shareholders in the company. So while thinking about the shareholder and what is our opinion, we are also thinking about ourselves.
Somebody has maybe remembered that Juhani invested about EUR 1 million in options of the company of his own money, and that, that means that he made very careful analysis of the situation. As this is Juhani's conclusion, our board's conclusions are required, all of the key shareholders, we think this is a good thing. Then we have, of course, shareholders who has come in as investors to the company over the period of several years, and I hope that there are some lucky ones here in the hall who came in around this time frame. When we had the first meeting of our current board, I think one of the first things what we did was a profit warning. So it's not so nice at the start, but after that, the stock price was EUR 0.47.
Then we decided that we need to, we need to support management, who we felt was very, very good. They had good and great strategies. Supporting the management is a good possibility for the company to go up, and the stock price as well, as it had, because this curve on the upper end, that shows what has happened with Comptel share price. I think a fair comparison is this here company survey. So these are the same kind of companies working in the same area, and these are the companies against which we have, during the process, evaluated what are our peers', price to sales, price to EBITDA, and so on. And we can see from this trend, we used to be below. The average is quite a bit, quite many analysts said that the company was undervalued.
But right now, after the last couple of years, we are increasingly reading analysts, also discussing with the U.S. financial houses, that the company begins to be, was overvalued than undervalued. So, when you consider about the premium, which is here in the upper box, one might also consider that the stock has gone up, quite a long way and, and quite rapidly in the last years. So basically, that was my presentation. And Bhaskar, if you please, describe the situation from Nokia's point of view. Thank you.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Actually, first, before I get into my presentation, I wanted to tell you a personal story. Pretty much almost a little over 10 years ago, Juhani and I met. He was in a very big company, and I was in a small company, a software house. So our journeys together started almost 10 years ago, and we've been very good friends since then in the industry. We partnered, we competed, and then we also drove some of the industry standards together. So I'm very excited to team up with Juhani again. What I want to briefly share with you is, who is the Nokia today? You know, we are, we are a new Nokia. I came to Nokia a year ago, through the Alcatel-Lucent acquisition.
I joined Alcatel a year before that. Prior to that, I built Oracle's telecom business, and I've been in startups and small companies before. We have about 37,000+ R&D capacity worldwide across our organization. And you know what? Size of our company, we are EUR 24 billion, and then we have some great assets with Nokia Bell Labs and Nokia Technologies. But I want to switch now from this to the applications group that I run. So I'm a little startup inside Nokia. About EUR 1.5 billion last year, about 9,000 employees and team members all over the world. We have a pretty broad portfolio.
We have an operations support portfolio, we have a business support systems portfolio, we have service delivery platforms, and we have a suite of emerging products, whether they are in Internet of Things, Cloud RAN and cloud technologies, security, analytics, and self-optimized networks. Our offices, I'm based, the business group is headquartered in California, in Palo Alto, where myself and my management team are. And we have offices in many of the same places, actually, where Comptel has. So we see a lot of great fit in potential integration and growth for us. At Capital Markets in November, we rolled out our strategy of rebalancing for growth, which primarily consisted of four things: leading in high performance networks; two, expanding across outside of the service providers; fourth, create new businesses and licensing.
But most important for me is the third one, which is build a standalone software business at scale. Today we are about EUR 1.6 billion, and we want to build that to a much larger software house size, hopefully. Now, what does building a standalone software business mean for us? First, most importantly, it means for us to strengthen and deepen our portfolio, whether it's in OSS or in BSS or SDP. And I'll come back on how this partnership with Comptel actually helps us doing the number one bullet. It helps us do our number two bullet. How do we expand in cloud and virtualization, intelligence and analytics, and IoT? We are transforming our go-to-market, which is having a dedicated sales force that only sells applications and software on top of the rest of the sales force that sells networking solutions.
We want to diversify our customer base beyond CSPs. As they move to become digital service providers, we wanna expand our offering. And last and finally, which is again, something that we feel we can do together, is how do we transition many of our products from on-premise software to software as a service? So these are the areas where we strongly believe teaming up with Comptel actually helps us in each and every one of those areas. Comptel brings service orchestration, which is industry leading, in terms of catalog-driven and digital service life cycle management. Comptel's event processing and intelligent data monetization is industry leading and has a huge focus. And we're focusing on device commerce, which is pretty exciting, and the IoT.
When we add that to what Nokia brings, we genuinely believe that we together are bringing some of the best orchestration technologies to cloud environment for our market. And most importantly, what this does, is operators today are trying to move from being traditional communication companies to digital service providers. They need to enable, attract, and interact with their customers in new ways. And while doing that, they need to be able to deliver new services rapidly. They need to automate their network, and most importantly, monetize and create new revenue streams. Together, the Nokia and Comptel, we strongly believe that we can help together our customers in their transformation on their digital journey. That's why we're very excited about teaming up with Juhani and Comptel. Juhani?
Thank you, Bhaskar. So, a few words about us, and there are many people here who know us from previous briefings and otherwise, but just to recap, what Comptel is as a company. Maybe before getting into that, just to remark that, as Chris showed the graph, we've gone over a tremendous transformation journey, and pretty much everything has been changed over the past five years. But the one thing that we haven't changed is our owners, so that is finally happening as well. So, we've been in the business for 30 years, so established 1986. We listed in the Helsinki Stock Exchange in 1999, but we actually celebrated 10 years in this business. We've always been a software company. We've always been in telecom, so that is our heritage.
Pretty much, if you look at us, I mean, we have pretty much the same customers as Nokia. We have, from a reference standpoint, over 300 telecom operators around the world. Maybe 250 of them are really active today. We've done 1,800 deliveries. We operate in over 90 countries. So, yes, we're a Finnish company, but we're also a very global company. 99% of our revenues come from outside of Finland. We have about 800 employees. One fourth, 25% are in Finland, and the majority are outside. Our biggest site is in Malaysia. In many respects, we are also from a diversity and nationality angle, very global. We have over 40 different nationalities in our company.
Over 80% of our personnel also have a master's degree or higher, so it's a very well-educated, capable workforce. Just a few numbers. So, we've been a specialist in certain areas, so meaning we've done and focused on a couple of things in the telecom infrastructure very well. We've been collecting billing information, so today we collect about 20% of all mobile billing data in the world. 20% of all those transaction records run through our systems, and we activate services for about 2 billion consumers around the world every day through our software. And that has been the foundation for us and where we are coming from. And, like I said, this has been a transformation journey, so for the past five years-...
We've been building, growing, and, pretty much if you look back, past three years, we've been growing in every respect. We've been growing our top line, and at the same time, we've been growing our profitability, market cap, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction. All of these, KPIs we've grown consistently now for several years. And, from our perspective, almost irrespective of this transaction, there has been this question that what next? So what do we need to do next? What is— We have built this platform. We have a great team. We have new portfolio of products. We've acquired almost 60 new telecom operators over the past, five years, as add to our customer base.
So we clearly aspire to do something bigger, and that has been the topic in our management discussions for the past six months or so. And when this opportunity came along, of course, we are looking at it as an opportunity for us to take the next step and really take on the big guys in the market and offer them something differentiated, something unique, something where we can really teaming up with Nokia, bring more value to our our customers that we serve on a daily basis. So what I've been telling my people is that when they got the news of this tender offer, they are interested in us because we are performing, and we are an interesting company.
So they are interested in us for all the right reasons, and that has been the tone of voice for us. So for us, what does this deal give? It gives us obviously more coverage. Even though we're in 90 countries, we're not in every operator. There are operators where we are not present. We will have a stronger joint offering. We have very little overlap, actually, in terms of our product portfolio, but jointly, we will be able to produce larger offerings. And many of our customers are very big companies. Many of them also will regard this as a positive move from the perspective of having broader shoulders, having more responsibility, because everything we do is business critical for them. We do things that are somehow, one way or the other, related to their revenue generation.
If the software doesn't work, the revenue doesn't come in, so we can't make any chances, and of course, they're very sensitive to that. U.S. market has been a topic. Many of you analysts have heard me talk about the U.S. market access. It is a big chunk of the overall market. Five years ago, we chose to go to other countries first, take market share in Asia. We doubled our revenues in Asia over the past three years, but we feel that now also is the right time to address the North American market. And that is one of the areas where we clearly feel that we will get the benefit of teaming up with Nokia.
And the plan, quite frankly, if this goes forward, we close it as the plan is, the plan really is to just increase the momentum, increase the speed, increase the focus, and take a broader share of the market and grow. That is all there is, and I think the timing is now, because as Bhaskar said, the landscape is changing, our customers are changing, the infrastructure is changing, everything will become virtualized. They will look for new capabilities and competencies that we can jointly provide. So I have personally had a few conversations with our largest customers this morning, and I think the initial reactions are positive. Many of them are, of course, also joint customers for us already.
We have been focusing on our customers' Chief Information Officers. We had historically had a very strong channel with the Chief Technology Officers, two different sides of the same organization. This is also another very complementary aspect of us working together. Maybe I'll probably stop here and hand over to Minna. I think it's time for Q&A.
Thank you very much, Juhani, and all the presenters. I would now like to open the floor for questions. We have some three people online as well. We'll take first questions from the room, and then we'll move to people who are on the phone lines. Please indicate your name, kindly, and wait for the microphone.
Yes, hello. Paul from Light Reading, a question to Mr. Ervi. Did you, during the three months you contemplated this deal, did you look for an alternative bid?
Yeah, good question. We did. Basically, everything that we consider makes sense. So let's start here from our own plans, discussions with the advisors in different countries. There were several of those, and then evaluating that if we would do so, what would it mean? Would it mean that we would gain clearly a higher price? Would it mean that we would risk the deal that was cooking already? We were in cooperation, and the outcome was that finally, we decided that we should focus on this deal and take it up. This will help us best for the shareholders.
A follow-up, if I may. If another network equipment supplier approached you with an offer, you would review that?
So we have some duties based on the law. If we get an offer, we need to review that, yes.
Great. Next question, next line in the middle. Yep. Good morning.
Mikael Rautanen, Inderes. Question for Bhaskar. You said one rationale was the business model transition from on-premise to software as a service. How does this deal help you in that transformation? What I understand is that Comptel is operating with those same on-premise software, where they have this one small startup FWD, but if you could give some color on that one.
Definitely. I think that's one of the fundamental things that Comptel brings to us. It further enhances our software DNA for the company. And some of the underlying technologies that we have actually partnered in the past and even today is very capable of being delivered as a SaaS. I think, so we think that the technological hurdle is not there. I think it's now about collectively the business model and how we go forward. And I think today, when we team up, we can create that, what I would call an opportunity, where we can convert on-premise up front.
When you're a small company, you know, you try to do that, but if we are part of a larger organization, we have that runway to take it as a SaaS offering, which makes it more predictable for us and therefore more profitable. I think we looked at it from a technology foundation, then that's why we think this will help us move forward. And of course, Forward is a business that already is on a SaaS-based offering. But those were the two reasons we believe this will help that accelerate.
Thank you. Next question, last row.
Yes, Artem Beletski from SEB. Just a question for Bhaskar, and maybe also quickly on what comes to synergies relating to the deal. What is the balance between the cost and upsell and synergies compared to cost synergies?
Let me start there. So this deal is about us executing on our strategy. It's about business upside. The deal is not about cost savings.
And I think for us, this is about how we make this more accretive, right? So today, you know, there are about close to 300 salespeople in Nokia focused exclusively on selling the applications portfolio. We immediately add that capacity to be able to leverage Comptel products. So you think about that, that's 3x-4x selling capacity increase. The second thing that Juhani mentioned is the U.S market. My business, the U.S. is a very large market. We have a huge presence at AT&T and at Verizon, and at T-Mobile. So we can now leverage these technologies over there. So I think we feel that the cross-selling and a comment you made, I think 95% of our portfolio does not overlap.
So we can now take a more fuller solution to our customers together, both increasing the attach for former Nokia solutions and former Comptel solutions. We see it as a, as a, a growth opportunity for both our portfolios.
Thank you. Do we have further questions in the room? We have one on the right here.
Matti from Carnegie. Good afternoon. One question to Comptel. If you haven't tried out competitive bids, how can you be sure that this is the best solution for the shareholders at the moment?
I think the best answer for that is that, there are some multiple suppliers you can start to look at. You can compare your own company and the offer price to some of the other prices that has been offered for similar kind of companies. And if the situation is such that the multipliers are already quite high, and you are adding a fair premium to this, and, the comments from different advisors from USA, from U.K., is that it's very unlikely that you will get a higher price, if you were to go out to bid. And our conclusion was that it's better to do this one deal properly, focus on that, we see the synergies. Personally, I also feel very warmly about that, we are now discussing with the second Finnish company. I'd rather do that than anything else.
Thank you. Next question in the room? If we don't have any questions in the room, operator, do we have questions on the line?
Ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question from the phone lines, please press zero-one on your telephone keypad now. We'll have a brief pause while questions are being registered. We have a question from the line of Ray Le Maistre from Light Reading. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Thank you. Yes, I've got a question about the existing relationship between Nokia and Comptel. Has Nokia's systems integration team already been integrating Comptel's software into Nokia customers? And has the Nokia sales team already been selling Comptel software to customers? Do they have a knowledge of the Comptel portfolio?
Yes, absolutely, yes. In fact, some of our biggest customers in Asia, we have been working with Comptel technology as part of our portfolio and delivering that. So we have delivery capabilities. We have a very large services arm, and so we have the competency to deliver Comptel products. Also, we have had joint selling opportunities pretty much everywhere, in every market we play in. So we definitely have that competency. And third, I think there are also some very good relationships in Nokia. I think today, as we announce this, I'm getting a lot of emails and texts from Nokia salespeople as to when can I go and sell this to my customer base?
There is good traction, there are very good proof points, and I think we are going to build upon that as we go.
Will you be keeping the Comptel salespeople?
Absolutely, grow that.
Operator, do we have questions on the line?
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. There appears to be no further questions at this point.
Thank you, operator. Do we have further questions in the room? Yes, please go ahead.
Thank you for Bhaskar. Comptel has made some early success in new product areas like Forward, Virtualization, and Fastermind. Were these new products something that draw your interest in the company specifically?
Yes. Let's take the three examples. The Forward is a very great example where this is, where this is from the end subscriber. How can we help our customers, help them attract more subscribers and more revenue per subscriber? Today, we see that as a very interesting technology. We have up to 1 billion subscribers on our platform. We can definitely see how we bring that to them, so very interested in that. The second thing you talked about is virtualization. When we combine what Nokia has with our cloud WAN, NFV, and Nuage SDN, and when you combine that with Comptel service orchestration, we will be now one of the only players who has the end-to-end cloud orchestration portfolio. So again, that's another a key differentiator, we think, in the market. Then the third one, you talked about intelligent data.
You know, today, Juhani said over 2 billion subscribers are, you know, mediation is going to. We bring almost a complementary set of subscriber numbers to this, just like in the U.S., and large customers in India and Europe. We can see all three of them to help us bring more revenue opportunities for our customers.
Thank you.
Thank you. Further questions from the room? Thank you. Operator, do we have further questions from the line?
Once again, please press zero one on your telephone keypad if you want to register for a question. We have a follow-up question from the line of Iain Morris from Light Reading. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi. Yes. Is this the first of a number of acquisitions to bolster this part of Nokia's business? Can we expect to see more acquisitions along the lines of Comptel in 2017?
I thought today you will ask that question. We are continuously looking at how we strengthen our software portfolio, both in R&D and products and go-to-market. Basically, we are making a lot of internal investments, and we will continue to be opportunistic in where things will accelerate either our go-to-market or accelerate our portfolio. So, but I think right now we are very excited about this combination.
I'll take that as a yes.
We have a-
As a comment on the previous question, I think you should take that as, you know, we will, we will do what it takes to execute our strategy. We like, this transaction, you know, partly also because the two companies share so much, all the way from values and culture, and that, you know, the respect that we have, on the Nokia side for the innovation that Comptel has been doing, and the entrepreneurship that they bring to Nokia is, is second to none. So we like this type of bolt-on, deal, and we'll be looking at them also, going forward.
Thank you. Do we have further questions from the line?
We have a question from the line of Janardan Menon from Liberum. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi. I just question for for Bhaskar. Just wondering, Comptel announced a EBIT margin of about 11% today. I was just wondering, you know, is- how do you see the profitability of of the business, the software business, this kind of software business that you plan to build up and grow in the longer term? Is that sort of a satisfactory margin level for you? Or, you know, would you expect, you know, the the business to eventually be at a at a higher level of profitability?
I can still take that and, and set some targets here for BSS and OSS, so clearly, our aspiration in software is to both grow and improve profitability. We need to be taking this business at levels where leaders in the industry are, and, you know, that needs to be the target that we set for ourselves.
So even the Comptel business, you think you could improve the profitability going forward?
I think the most important thing, as we have talked about today, is that we are bringing together complementary assets, assets here, and we need to look at how we make the best out of that, those assets together, and maybe rather than, you know, not track profitability individually over the long term, we are putting together things that we wanna generate good business out of that going forward.
Yeah, and I think I'd add to that in terms of the way we wanna drive this profitability together is by growing the top line. I think that is the key aspect to it, you know? And the way we grow our top line is we bring our breadth and selling capacity and install base to the portfolio that Juhani and Comptel's team bring, and vice versa, that we take these technologies and enable our teams to sell. So this is about how do we grow the top line? The right investments have been made so far. That's what got us excited both here in applications and at Comptel. Now is the time on how we build the top line, and that's where the combination will drive. So.
Good. Thank you.
Operator, do we have a call with the questions on the line?
There are no further questions at this point.
Thank you very much. We have, Juhani.
Yes, I'm Juhani Rossi. I'm from Alma Talent, a business media outlet over here in Finland. First, gentlemen from Nokia, acquisitions typically destroy shareholders' value. What makes you think that this time it's different?
So maybe without commenting on your first part of the question, I would say that, again, I think we are bringing together two companies which, on the one hand, complement each other from a product offering point of view. This goes directly towards the Nokia strategy of building a standalone software business at scale. And then there is a lot of commonality to build on, which will, you know, make working together easier and more efficient from day one. And it really starts with kind of common values and a common culture that we can leverage. Because of that, feel that this is the right transaction for shareholders on the Nokia side.
Do we have further questions?
Once again, ladies and gentlemen, to register for a question, press star one on your telephone keypad now.
All right, it seems that we have. I'd like to warmly thank you for attending this meeting, and.