Nokia recently reported a loss which was smaller than that expected by the analysts and forecast that the handset business of the company will be profitable for this quarter as the Finland based manufacturer is gearing up to introduce its phones which run Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. As a result, the shares of the company went up right after the announcement.
Its loss in the third quarter amounted to 68 million euros, much lower than the average loss of 229 million euros which was estimated by analysts. The company’s sales went down by 13% to reach 8.98 billion euros as the shipments for handsets dropped by 3% to reach 106.6 million units, said Nokia in a statement released today. Analysts had predicted the sales to be around 93.6 million units.
Stephen Elop, the company’s CEO, is expected to unveil the first Nokia manufactured Windows Phone at the event named Nokia World, which is to be held in London next week. While making the transition to the new platform, the company has sharply increased phasing out of its handsets based on the Symbian platform, which had already been losing a large share of the market to Google and Apple.
Elop said that the results show that the execution of the sales and channel inventory of the company have improved substantially. After the announcement, Nokia went up by 8% and its stock reached 4.76 euros. Nokia had earlier stated that it will start the shift to Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its main mobile OS from this year itself, with large volumes of those devices planned for the next year.
Nokia, which is the largest mobile handset manufacturer in the world in terms of volume, had a 22.8% share during the second quarter stated a report from Gartner Inc. It also fell down to the third place in terms of smartphone sales to resellers and carriers as Samsung Electronics and Apple passed it for the first time in a decade during this quarter.
During the third quarter, Apple sold as many as 17.07 million iPhone devices. The California based company also set a record by selling 4 million iPhone 4S units last week in its debut weekend. Elop has stated that Nokia will continue with the sales of Symbian devices and support the software with upgrades till 2016.
