Nokia has posted its earnings call for the second quarter of 2011, and unsurprisingly they’re poor. Very poor indeed.
The troubled Finnish mobile phone manufacturer has stumbled on hard times this past year and now their troubles are worsened by a massive slump in sales. Nokia’s financial report for Q2 posts an enormous loss of £427 million.
Smartphone sales have fallen by a third in the past 3 months, which is hardly surprising given Nokia’s one smartphone that has been released this year (The N9, which isn’t actually on sale yet), and the continued rise of the iPhone and Android products.
With 88.5 million phones sold in the past three months, you’d be fooled into thinking Nokia must have done well. Wrong. Overall sales of Nokia phones have fallen by 18%, adding to the monumental profit loss of 44%.
One year ago today Nokia was sitting pretty as the number one smartphone manufacturer and posted a Q2 profit of £257 million. One year on and they have just lost first place to none other than Apple. To put that into some sort of statistical perspective, Nokia sold 16.7 million smartphones this quarter compared to Apple’s 20.3 million. Bear in mind that Apple has only three models of iPhone on the market, compared to Nokia’s legion of Symbian-based smartphones.
As expected, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop assured Nokia shareholders that all was not lost and that the partnership with Windows Phone 7 would be their saving grace.
“We are making better-than-expected progress towards our strategic goals,” he said. “Those who already have viewed our early Windows Phone work are very optimistic about the devices Nokia will bring to market” says Elop.
We’ve recently seen Nokia’s first Windows Phone, Sea Ray, caught on video and it looks good. But will it be enough to save Nokia’s burning platform?