Nokia is probably the best known Finnish company in the world. There is a town named Nokia there. Nokia’s ADR stock with ticker NOK used to be high flier during the dot com boom years.
There are a few other Finnish stocks that are worth looking into. They are StoraEnso, UPM and Metso. While StoraEnso and UPM are in the forestry and paper business, Metso is in the Industrial Engineering sector. It provides all the technologies needed by UPM and StoraEnso to process the lumber.
From the table below, we can see that NOK has been average performer over the past 5 years when compared with Metso. An investment of $10K five years ago in Metso has grown over 655%. Clearly Metso seems to an undiscovered gem operating in the niche area serving the forestry and mining industries.
A brief overview from Metso’s corporate site:
“Metso is an international technology corporation that serves customers in the pulp and paper industry, rock and minerals processing, power generation and other selected industrial sectors. Metso Corporation comprises three business areas: Metso Paper, Metso Minerals and Metso Automation.
In 2007, Metso Corporation’s net sales totaled over EUR 6 billion. Metso has business operations in approximately 50 countries, and almost 27,000 employees. ”
The following is a list of Finland ADRs. Very thinly traded stocks are excluded from this list.
[TABLE=47]
* Nokia and Metso are in this year’s Business Week’s list of “Euro BW 50”.
