Nokia has just announced its Q3 2013 financial results, revealing an operating profit of EUR118 million ($162 million) from EUR 5.66 billion ($7.8 billion) revenue. That’s up massively year over year, but nonetheless represents another quarter of middling results. The report is the first since Microsoft agreed to purchase Nokia’s phone business, and that division – Devices and Services – performed as expected, posting a small loss of EUR 86 million ($118 million).
So, Microsoft is buying the part of Nokia that is losing money, while the parts that make money remain in Finland. Seems like a good deal for Nokia-proper. In the meantime, Microsoft will be saddled with a devices division that is still losing money, and whose increase in sales consists largely of low-end, low-margin devices (like the 520). Interesting – especially since Windows Phone was supposed to prevent Nokia participating in a race to the bottom. I’m sure Microsoft’s super-successful Surface division welcomes Nokia’s devices division.
The cold truth: even more than 2.5 years after announcing the switch to Windows Phone, Nokia’s Lumia range still cannot make up for drop in sales of Symbian devices and feature phones. This is roughly the same timeframe in which Samsung rose to the top. With Android.
Read into that what you will.
Just wanted to point out I called the volumes for this quarter with 100% accuracy. As in exactly what I predicted would happen did happen. Exactly. Down to the percentage increase.
http://www.osnews.com/thread?575084
I called for a little less than 9 million and ~20% sequential growth in my analysis. Just something to keep in mind before the Always Wrong Club shows up.
A few important things to take away here: NSN and HERE continue to perform strongly.
D&S deepens losses (or increases investments, depends how you view the glass) but that’s largely irrelevant now that they’re part of a rich behemoth like Microsoft.
Lumia shipments continue to increase at a nice rate, its been around a year of sequential increase (and over a year I believe of underlying profitability).
For comparison, LG had flat shipments this quarter. That’s an opportunity for Nokia (and others) to catch up to the other OEMs.
re: 520. I think Nokia moving volumes is good because it increases the developer target audience which improves the ecosystem and drives high end sales. We’ll see how the 520 successors perform.
Next quarter I expect a stronger sequential increase than this due to seasonality. They can probably crack 10 million on the back of compelling low and mid range devices.
It feels good being right though, I’ve got to say.
Might I suggest the Always Uninterested In Exact Financial Predictions About a Once Great Handset Maker Club as a more precise, if less succinct, name?
They’re so uninterested they consistently make bad calls? That’s a new one.
I get made out to be a shill, a troll, an astroturfer, etc but quarter after quarter it is my predictions which stand out as being on the mark. Every time.
*snif* They grow up so fast, it was not long ago you couldn’t parse Nokia’s own financial statements correctly, and now you’re an “expert.”
LMAO
You’re welcome to show me where I was wrong.
In the words of the dude…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQl5aYhkF3E
So you can’t. Gotcha.
But… but I was cheering you on!
Your out of context selectively arbitrary number was spot on! Congrats.
I predicted Nokia would not make it with Windows Phone.
I was right.
They had to sell their devices division to Microsoft.
I think your criteria for failure is a little peculiar in light of a years worth of increases, increases in North America, a growing ecosystem, and a strong brand name.
But yeah, sure, “failure”. I called these results 100% on the mark. You’ve been so wrong on everything the broken clock analogy doesn’t even apply.
I’m sorry, but weren’t you the one yapping about that the low end devices aren’t low margin? These numbers and previous quarters just ads to the proof that they are selling low margin devices, that have high development and support costs.
I’m sorry, have you magically come back with tangible proof that the 520 is a low margin device?
If you have access to the 520 BOM please fill me in because I’ve been trying to get ahold of it.
Nokia’s D&S loss once you exclude one time restructuring and amortized costs is actually fairly low (if an increase from previous Q) but it is by no means burning a hole in anyone’s wallet.
I think Nokia has pretty good fixed costs now in D&S judging by their drop off in operational overhead as well with increases due to new product roll outs.
Yes… Yet, unlike you, we have Nokia’s results. You actually have nothing to prove otherwise. The likelihood of it being a low margin device is higher and has more backing evidence than your assertion.
And if you’re going demand a factual BOM(that only covers the manufacturing part), then I’ll have to ask for the same to prove your side.
I don’t have it, but there is the L900 BOM (~230) and the 520 uses cheaper parts. Assuming they maintain feature phone like margins (which are 26-29%) and you account for price discounting to get it at around $100 you don’t arrive at a terribly low margin in my estimation.
I am not factoring sunk marketing dollars into the device though, but then again I don’t think it fundamentally applies when those dollars are allocated to Smart Devices as a whole (same with inventory allowances, and in some cases they’re reversed like last Q).
Basically fixed costs can and are coming down. That can change. Manufacturing costs are more or less a baseline.
Don’t need the BOM info to figure this out.
Look at the earnings report and the distribution of 52x handsets among all WP units:
Lumia sales up 19%. ASP dropped from €157 to €143 which is down 9.1% Selling more, getting less per unit average.
Adduplex shows that the 52x makes up 32.8% of all WP handsets, not just Nokias. So it wasn’t recent price drops on older handsets that killed the ASP because they weren’t selling a lot of the older, higher margin Lumias. But loads of 52x though.
Lower margin ; QED.
ASP has nothing to do with per device margins. What the fuck. Please exit this conversation.
QED is reserved for when a coherent point is made.
Just thought you’d like to see what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a stream of nonsense for a change since you are normally stuck on send. (-:
Rationalize your stupidity however you’d like, just stop posting.
I YIELD!
Thus you are hereby awarded the Special Olympics Gold Medal in Internet Arguing.
Please accept it in the spirit it is offered and wear it proudly!
Edited 2013-11-02 23:33 UTC
The Nokia 520 is nothing more than a generic bottom of the range ARM smartphone. The profit margins are likely to be very high (>100%).
>100% margins are only possible with production costs being 0.
But you are a shill. You show all kinds of positive results and predictions for Nokia, except the ones that actually matter: will they survive? Well, they didn’t.
And still, you’re technically right.
Uh, Nokia is still alive. Feel free to keep making things up though.
Yes, yes. Not as a handset maker, though. Like I said: you’re technically right.
And NSN is now solely a mobile broadband solution, but that isn’t “dead”.
D&S, the 32,000 employees, and 8,000 patents got transferred to Microsoft for $7 billion dollars. How is moving to a company with a market cap of $300 billion dollars dying?
Did Skype die? Did Yammer die? I think we can say that Nokia is no longer in the phone business, and we can say that Microsoft is in the phone business. But we cannot say that Nokia or any part of it died.
If Nokia had laid off the 32,000 employees and shuttered its phone division, closed its plants, and thrown in the white flag then perhaps — but that’s not at all what happened.
Edited 2013-10-29 21:41 UTC
I went through the IFRS financials.
Nokia made out very well. They transfer a lot of employees out to Microsoft in the EU with its comprehensive social welfare systems. They get cold hard cash to pay off the $2.291B in financing they took this year which resulted in their high CFF. They keep the business units that make money.
Microsoft, depending on how they structure the deal with their international subsidiaries, will find a way to make money on a declining asset. Yes, they have high YoY, and you probably did make money. However, I don’t see this making money for Microsoft without a few financial wizards figuring out how to bury the losses in the income and cash flow statements.
This much I will say for Nokia: They are moving to a higher-margin business where they provide middleware and mostly getting out of the consumer segment. NSN should provide higher margins.
Microsoft is a nice big company, but they fail to see beyond Windows, Office, Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange, and Sharepoint. XBox is the exception. They’re almost as bad as Dell at integrating their purchases. Microsoft needs someone like Gates to put it together at the top like he did, because Ballmer hasn’t.
Speaking of which, Nokia wasted tons of money, and had poor leadership. At least Elop got some money for a division that couldn’t put it together. Too bad that several good mobile operating systems were the casualty of their mismanagement.
I agree. I think people underestimate the enormous financial strain that employees have on a company beyond just a salary. It costs money to let people go.
Furthermore what the MSFT transaction did was pretty much ensure Nokia’s financial survival. Their balance sheet will overnight look much better.
They are essentially a new company.
I think it all depends on how they ramp up volume. D&S on a non-IFRS basis actually is pretty close to break even.
If they can smoothly integrate Lumia (push it as a premier brand like Skype) and let Nokia more or less operate independently then I think they can work with less friction than before.
For example, Nokia as close as it was to Microsoft still kept secrets (and vice versa) which kept a lot of product planning in a less than optimal state.
Microsoft financials are pretty much indecipherable now due to the reorg. If Nokia makes losses it’ll be hidden somewhere, if they make a profit or have a sharp revenue uptick I’m sure they’ll let everybody know.
I really am going to hate trying to glean tidbits of information on D&S.
I would’ve preferred them stay the course with HTC or someone else (Lenovo) forming a strategic partnership with Microsoft. What’s done is done though, Nokia is now a very solid, if boring company.
I’ve said it before the guy in charge of Azure should run the company. To take Azure from shambles to the powerhouse it is now is nothing short of remarkable.
Unlike Skype, Lumia is not an established brand today. Nokia part of Nokia Lumia is.
Microsoft will have to establish that brand before they can integrate it into anything.
Says who? You?
Time in the market and Nokia’s unwillingness to licence their name for Lumia are both on my side.
Their unwillingness to license the Nokia name for the Lumia line is proof that the Lumia name is not strong?
The market has actually shown four consecutive quarters of double digit volume growth.
Which is totally irrelevant in the context of this long debate – Nokia + Windows Phone + Elop. NSN was doing great and had no relation to Nokia’s handset business, except the shared canteen at Karaportti campus.
And what does your emotional and wildly inaccurate comparisons have to do with it?
Nokia is not dead. But Nokia the mobile phone is, unlike Nokia the rubber boot.
The point is that a divestment doesn’t mean you’re dead. It hasn’t in the past when Nokia has shed portions of NSN.
That acquired businesses and the hosts they leave behind don’t die. Nokia isn’t dead and D&S within Microsoft isn’t dead.
Apart? Yes. Dead? Only on OSNews.
Glad we can agree.
What’s your prediction for next year? The year after? Is the new Microsoft smartphone division ever going to turn a profit?
I think they’ll turn a profit at around 12.5 million which is what Microsoft guided in their investor slides, so perhaps by Q2 and Q3 next year at current trajectories.
As far as volumes, I’m expecting stronger Q4 than this quarter. Anything beyond that depends on product rollouts and stats I extrapolate from which aren’t out yet. And there’s a little intuition mixed in there somewhere.
I expect a profit short to medium term after the MSFT deal closes. How fast they get settled within MSFT can change this.
And a more important note to make is that NSN and HERE are largely irrelevant to you general narrative of WP growth.
We also were the ones that will go “told you so” with “it’s the low margin devices”.
But it’s good that you are focusing on the positive.
My narrative of WP growth? This is yet another quarter of double digit unit volume growth. They’re at double digit share in many countries. The ecosystem has grown considerably. They’re #2 in many regions already.
The hype is real.
Yes, your narrative is all about WP. NSN’s profits has jack-s***t to do with WP.
“narrative is any account of connected events, presented to a reader or listener in a sequence of written or spoken words”
I’m speaking about Nokia as a whole in my analysis. As a whole they’re doing just fine, and they didn’t die for precisely the reasons I said they wouldn’t a year ago (seriously, go and check the thread).
And D&S is also looking up, but they are two separate observations.
NSN has little more than a casual relation to D&S in that its strong profits (and Nokia’s reduced operating expenses) keep the company afloat and allow investment into D&S.
I think you jumped the gun a little bit on this and seem to be unfairly trying to downplay NSN and HERE because you think I’m using them to prop up D&S.
to go from arterial bleeding to hemorraghing isn’t exactly a good success metric.
The PR world revolves around selective delusion. So “hitting rock bottom” being heralded as unquestionable proof of a “most successful buoyancy strategy” should not be that surprising. They can’t sink any lower after all.
I think Nokia bottomed out a year ago, considering since then they’ve posted shipment increases every quarter.
But its a fact free zone when the Always Wrong Club is involved.
LOL, it’s always funny reading your crap.
So everything in Nokia is making profits, except smartphones…
Microsoft is buying the 118mi losing division? Make that 268mi. Let’s not forget the MS quarterly gift.
Another thing people forgot Nokia smartphones ASP have reached a new record low of 196USD! Around half the global market average.
And what does a loss matter to a company with the size and resources that Microsoft has?
They are the most stubborn and tenacious competitor on the planet. D&S is dangerously close to break even.
A loss posting division with rapidly accelerating losses and deteriorating unit sales is cause for concern. Not one with increasing unit sales, decreasing expenses, and an improving ecosystem.
You miss the forest for the trees, but my post is the funny one…riight.
LOL, did you just provide an example for my point?
Even with those increases, Nokia’s current WP line moved only 60% as many units this year as Symbian was selling 3 years ago. Heck,WP is selling as many units for Nokia now as Symbian did in 07. Worse still, Nokia’s shipment numbers in the smartphone space have remained pretty much flat during the past 3 years. So basically Nokia experienced a “lost” half a decade… in the market segment which has experienced the highest growth rate during that same time period. And that is even after 3 years of full effort and massive cash inputs.
Suddenly, when actual context is provided, those selective “growth” numbers you croon about don’t look that impressive.
… but enough about yourself.
That’s great and all if you’re trying to show that Nokia once sold a lot of phones. I think everybody is aware of that.
The thing to note is how have they done since then and how are they doing now. The answer is not too shabby given the increases since last year.
You’re a smart guy though, misguided, silly, but smart so I don’t think that you don’t know this. You just for some reason unbeknownst to me continue to play dumb.
I don’t think its reasonable to have expected Nokia to have growth rates and volume shipments out of step with basically every OEM except Samsung and Apple simply because they once did. It isn’t 2007 anymore (for real, check your calendar), so obviously market conditions then don’t apply.
So if by context you mean red herring volume shipments completely unrelated to their current strategy, then yes ill grant you that.
People, who are interested in actually understanding an issue, are aware that context is crucial in order to understand what numbers and figures reflect about a specific situation/event.
Unsurprisingly, those with astroturfing narratives as their primary motivation tend to consider the actual contexts of their (marketing) figures to be “red herrings,” for they may detract from the PR effect of said numbers.
From your response it’s rather easy to tell on which camp you reside.
Like I mentioned, it depends on if you think Nokia has some out of the ordinary trait that would make gargantuan shipment increases possible. The amount of volume they’d need to both offset and then improve on Symbian’s past volumes are astronomical.
No OEM is currently exhibiting growth patterns like that save for the market leaders. Unless you expected Windows Phone to catapult them overnight to market leadership (insane if you thought it was possible from either WP or Android), Nokia’s current growth trajectory is fantastic.
They’re growing faster than other Android OEMs at comparable volumes and seeing a stabilizing financial situation.
You can call it PR, or Astroturfing or whatever uncreative name you toss out next, but this is exactly what I’ve been saying would happen. Apparently this quarter I was especially on target.
The Always Wrong Club moniker may annoy you, but its an accurate depiction of some on this website.
Dude, what are you going on about? You were right about a couple of figures without any context, which you keep trying to use as some kind of vindicated analysis. When in reality Microsoft had to bail out at significant expense Nokia’s device division, because after 3 years of partnership their biggest WP OEM did not manage to turn a single profit.
You keep repeating your script over and over, trying to turn a clear sign of desperation about being squeezed out of a strategic market, into some kind of managerial tour de force.
I just hope you ain’t doing all this astroturfing for Micronokia on a pro bono basis, that would be exceedingly sad.
LOL.
In the short term posting losses doesn’t matter. Nokia always had Microsoft’s implicit backing which was materialized in quarterly payments, engineering resources, $2B in loans to offset the NSN stake buyout, matched marketing dollars, etc.
It was a subsidized phone ecosystem with significant marketing dollars and loans from Microsoft.
It costs money to bootstrap an ecosystem, as BB tragically learned. So while BB exits phones, Nokia’s phone division is transplanted to Microsoft.
Existing synergies make this move nothing more than making an implicit backing an explicit one. Microsoft now officially owns D&S, but it essentially belonged to them this entire time.
Could D&S have turned a profit sans Microsoft? Yes, very likely next year with increasing volumes. I’m sure in all your context you neglect to mention how much the financial situation in D&S has improved.
1. D&S losses are shrinking with volume increases
2. Volumes are increasing faster than competitors (19% vs 9% for Lenovo and -0.1% for LG) at similar volumes.
Lenovo is at 12.3 million and LG is at 12 million. At the rate Nokia is going, a strong Q4 will break them into Top 5 Smartphone vendors.
LG posted a loss this quarter by the way, but in a long game nobody cares. LG has more than enough money. Nokia (via Microsoft) has more than enough money.
What matters is volumes because that’s what grows an ecosystem which moves higher end devices and has an additive effect on sales and bottom line.
I think the problem you and a lot of others have is that Nokia is breaking the whole “Nokia is dying” narrative. To you, and I’m sure Thom it would’ve been delightful to see Nokia die last year during the billion dollar losses. Obviously that didn’t happen so things for you get a little more comfortable.
BUT THEY HAVE DIED.
You really don’t get it, do you? Do you really think Nokia-proper sold its devices division because it was doing so super-well? Do you really think that Nokia-proper decided to put it up for sale because they were afraid of the loads of money the devices division was going to rake in in the near future?
Let me make this obvious fact very clear to you.
By selling the devices division to Microsoft, Nokia-proper got rid of a failing section of the company that has been losing money for years now, despite massive quarterly cash injections from Microsoft. Nokia-proper saw the writing on the wall, as did Microsoft, and so Redmond was forced to do the only thing it could do: it had to buy the devices division to prevent either Nokia-proper spinning it off in a separate business, selling it to someone else, or maybe even shutting it down entirely.
Despite all your shilling, the devices division has been a massive drain on Nokia-proper’s resources, and just as everyone except you predicted, it did not make it. It’s mind-boggling how you continue to claim otherwise – food for psychologists.
Fascinating.
They just posted a profit and will after the deal closes have around $11 billion dollars in cash.
Dead indeed. LOL.
No, the person who doesn’t get it is you. I’ve explained this multiple times (usually to no response from you)
They put themselves up for sale because of the short term uncertainty. Basically $7B upfront > ??? over the next few years. That and Microsoft took the liabilities of 32,000 employees off of their hands. Its an offer they couldn’t refuse.
They are now certain to be out of financial calamity whereas with D&S it would have to factor in the inherent uncertainty that D&S had. Yes it is doing better, yes it is posting stronger volumes, but no it is not an assured win. That coincidentally is what I’m saying.
I don’t think any of those would’ve happened, certainly not at their current trajectory. It would’ve been difficult, financially uncertain, and time consuming but I don’t think Nokia was going to give up like BBRY did.
What is fascinating how someone who has been wrong on everything(remember the other thread where I went through some lengths to show you where you’ve made hilariously stupid predictions) has the gall to say that I’m wrong while not being able to cite a single prediction I’ve made that hasn’t panned out. A single one.
Keep that in mind. Not one prediction. I completely accounted for this sale and even said EXACTLY how it would happen. I’ve called the volumes for Lumia devices on the money for the past few quarters now. I’ve said D&S wouldn’t lead to larger losses and in fact would lessen, which they have.
Your track record sucks, the few times you actually have the courage to make a prediction.
Really?? Tell this to the shareholders or owners of that company! I am sure that they will not agree with you!
Is this the new (lame) excuse for a business to loose money?!!
Nokia that was making mobile phones has died already!!!! Microsoft has bought it in case that this has not been noticed!
Only problem with Symbian handsets – they weren’t really used as smartphones.
What is the point of this when Nokia actually is loosing money by selling smartphones??
Nokia 2 years ago had ~33% of phone market and now it has ~3.3%. Clearly this is a failure for NOKIA and a sequential growth means nothing when one has a very small percentage of the phone market!
For every small company(and small “fishes”) it is very easy to show sequential growth and this makes the sequential growth meaningless.
Nelson enjoys taking numbers out of context. He’s also not affraid of moving the goalposts. Which is why he claims to be right every time. He did in one thread go from 10 to 8 million sold phones and now he was spoton the 9 million sold units…
Find the thread. I link the post with our very conversation.
Exactly! Nelson’s statements miss the big picture which is that Nokia is loosing money while selling phones and Nokia has been doing this for a long time this already!
See here: “Nokia Q3 2013: $7.9B in Revenue but Phone Division Loses $118M”
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/10/29/nokia-q3-2013-7-9b-in-reven…
Nokia is losing money, but dramatically less money than say, a year ago. That is gradually improving as its device volumes improve and as its restructuring efforts taper off, as I said they would.
I had the audacity of suggesting that with their cash on hand back in 2011 they could
a) Weather the storm so go speak
b) Improve other divisions to improve the overall company financials
c) Improve D&S volumes to improve the profit margin
I don’t reply to a lot of comments like your or the OP because they are a mischaracterization of my positions. I don’t care what Nokia had 2 years ago, only what they have and where they’re going with it.
But just to entertain that a little bit, the #3 position holder in smartphone volumes is LG with around 5% of the market.
Samsung and Apple control the big numbers and are pretty much the only ones who do. Surprise, surprise. They’re the market leaders. Nokia isn’t going to get there overnight, if at all.
What is incontrovertible is that Windows Phone is growing in many regions, especially important regions with low penetration. That is the exact same growth traits Android experienced in its early days. You don’t simultaneously thrive everywhere, you have offshoots of success from place to place.
If we’re going to set the bar every quarter at “They’re not Samsung/Apple” then your comments pretty much go without saying and apply to every other OEM on this planet (though presumably you don’t refer to their strategy as failures).
LG posted a loss this quarter on flat volume shipments. Nokia posted a profit on 20% growth. But Nokia is failing.
And a word about the sequential and YoY improvements. The argument about “its a small base” are meaningless now that they are in the same range as other OEMs.
Every quarter it becomes harder to post double digit gains, yet they keep doing it. They keep doing it while others do not.
Consider my reply to the OP a reply to your post above as well as pretty much the same things apply.
That is the most important point! Nokia is loosing money while selling phones! The goal of a business is to make money! This means that selling phones is not a good bussines for Nokia. It is as simple as that!
Everything else like future income estimates, guesses, and future projections are just that and nothing else!
Ok. So you care about Nokia one year ago but not two years ago! That is very convenient for you logic!
I am not interested in Apple and Samsung and LG.
All I am saying is that Nokia is loosing money by selling phones so this is not a good business for them!
Nokia should and it got out of the bad business of selling phones! Clearly, there is nobody making money by selling Windows phones!
Again growing compare to what?
And how it helps Nokia that it grows in some markets by some strange computations when overall Nokia is loosing money by selling mobile phones????
Really?
What is the point of this? Is somehow Windows Phones like Android? I do not think so. By this logic even Jolla phones will succeed because they look like Android in beginning!
I am not interested in others. I am interested in Nokia. Obviously Nokia was number 1 in mobile phones 3 years ago with ~33% and now is barely has 3.3%. This is a complete disaster for Nokia mobile phones! One does not have to be genius to see this!
Not interested in LG!
Yes, YoY and quarter to quarter comptutations are meaningless for any company which has less than 10% of the market!!!
It is very easy to have growth quarter to quarter when you are below 10% of the market!
It makes sense when you are tracking the success or failure of a strategy. Nokia was on a downward trajectory due to collapsing Symbian market share. It finally bottomed out after posting billion dollar losses last year.
This is me June 2012:
Nokia shares are now about to hit $8. Anyone who listened to me and invested is swimming in money right now.
I go on
All of which they have done, especially the last bullet point to great effect.
I think you’re wrong for the same reason a lot of people here were wrong last year. You look at figures in isolation instead of identifying a trend. Windows Phone sales trend upwards and as they trend upward (strongly I might add, Sony grew 4%, Lenovo grew 9%, LG grew 0%, and Nokia grew 19%) their financial position will stabilize.
They lost a billion dollars last year. People back then were saying Nokia was going to die imminently. Now they’ve posted a profit (after I warned it was inevitable due to underlying profitability for five quarters in a row and fading out restructuring charges) and the D&S division is starting to stabilize.
Growing compared to Sony, LG, Lenovo, ZTE, Huawei, HTC, and BB.
Nokia is on a region by region basis growing as well in key markets, and this is starting to spread. I warned about it when it was 6% in the UK and now its crossed double digits there.
Things are trending upwards.
I understand they were 33% and that they were #1, but they are not anymore and expecting them to be #1 again without first being #9, #8, #7, #6, #5, #4, #3, and #2 is foolish.
They won’t go from zero to 60 over night. Things take time, and time has proven me right. I’ve predicted Windows Phone increases exactly the quarters they’ve increased, pretty much exactly on target (in fact this quarter I predicted Nokia’s volume shipments exactly).
I predicted that the Q3 sales dip was a blip (while others ridiculed me for it) and it turns out, holy fuck, it was a blip.
You should be! Because Nokia was two quarters behind the other market rivals and now they’re about one quarter behind. This is what continual double digit growth does. Nokia is catching up faster than its rivals can pull away, and soon Nokia will crack the Top 5 smartphone vendors again. (Its currently ~8)
In fact I expect that to happen next quarter. From there if it continues on its trajectory it can overtake the #3 position before this time next year.
So for any company that’s not Apple and Samsung sequential and yearly increases are meaningless?
You know Lenovo is #3 with only ~5% market share right? That’s such a ridiculous notion that I’m not sure why I even bothered responding.
Not it is not or other vendors (LG for example) would be doing it consistently.
Microsoft should repeat the Xbox scenario (sell hardware at a loss to help the platform grow).
Where are the price cuts for Lumias?
i think thats the 520.
So the phones are loosing money but otherwise Nokia “proper” is doing great. Are they back in the boots business?
The other half of the company. Mapping, network infrastructure, and the AT division which focuses on forward facing projects. And a boatload of weaponized patents.
Except the other ‘half’ of the company is 3 quarters of it ; the other 3 divisions that make up Nokia.
And mobile phones are a minitority of Nokia employees…
Even if you are right, it is not wise to go against the market.
BlackBerry’s CEO Mike Lazaris in 2008: “The most exciting mobile trend is full Qwerty keyboards. I’m sorry, it really is.” Let’s assume that Qwerty keyboards ARE better for text input – even then it’s stupid because the market clearly wanted full touch screens. Don’t be smarter than the market…..
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer legendary “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Wrong! Look at the market!
Nokia’s move to Windows: “People want an alternative for Android and iOS”. Why not go with the strongest grower on the market (Android)? Look at the reviews: “Nokia has great hardware, but you’ll have to live with WindowsPhone……”
Let’s compare it to automobiles. Say Honda was in trouble, because people now bought electric cars from companies like Tesla. The smart move for Honda would be to go with the flow and build an electric car, of course! And certainly not make an expertimental hydrogen car, “because people need a 3rd choice, next to fossil fuels and electric” And yet this is what Nokia did…..
Edited 2013-10-30 15:44 UTC
Actually, current hydrogen production comes from fossil fuels…
I like to look at it like WP has a proprietary maker now. (I know Nokia was basically that, but now it’s internal with MS now). I can see this helping the WP market even more now. Just like Apple’s iOS & iPhone. WP needed this to happen, MS needed to MAKE the phone on top of making the OS. Look at Xbox division and how well it is doing from version 1 to 2 (soon to be 3). Yeah, Surface isn’t doing as well….yet (when they merge WP and RT, I think that’ll make it a lot better). WP and Surface are showing improvements. In any case, it’s nice to have options.
Yes, the market/sales for these phones is improving. What about retention of consumers to create an installed base?
Totally anecdotal and unsupported by any evidence that I have been able to discover. (I did look for info about installed base numbers and didn’t find any. My google-fu is weak here!):
I saw a post on one the the Nokia stock boards saying that there are currently about 32 million Windows Phone handsets in service now. Nokia sold about 24 million Lumias so far this year. WP handsets have been available for just about 3 years now. How/why can the user base be that low (if that figure is correct)?
This makes it look like users are leaving the WP platform at a very large rate if Nokia can sell that many phones and the user base still be that small.
Anyone able to find numbers of phones with contracts? Because if this is true MSFT will have to brace for deficit spending on these phones for now and maybe indefinitely.