Nokia Surprises Us by Releasing Q4 Smartphone Results Early. So 3% for Q4 and 5% for full year 2012? And they think this is 'good' ???

So here we go.. Nokia surprised a lot of Nokia-watchers by releasing its official smartphone shipments numbers today, well before the final Q4 results are due. So we can do the Nokia part of Q4 Bloodbath analysis and also the full year for Nokia. As Nokia is the last vendor left providing Symbian, we can do Symbian for Q4 and full year, and as Nokia does the vast majority of Windows Phone, we can also do preliminary estimate for Q4 and Full Year 2012 results for Microsoft's Windows Phone ecosystem. Is it the promised 'third ecosystem'...

NOKIA Q4 SMARTPHONES

Nokia smartphones shipped 6.6 million units in Q4, up only 5% from Q3 when it sold 6.2 million smartphones. This is down from 19.6 million one year ago when Lumia first launched and 28.8 million when Nokia sold only Symbian based smartphones.

Nokia preliminary market share for Q4 is 2.8% (on my target market total unit sales number Q4 of 240 million smartphones). This is down from 3.6% in Q3 and 12.4% one year ago. More ironically, as Nokia's market share was 28.8% in Q4 the last quarter before the Elop Effect and Nokia's new strategy, Elop has managed to scare away literally 9 out of every 10 customers in just 24 months. This is a world record in market failure - not just in mobile phones, in any industry ever, by a global market leader of a Fortune 500 sized company. Literally a world record failure!

For the full year 2012 Nokia has shipped 35.0 million smartphones and end the year with 5% market share. That is a collapse from 2011 when it sold 77.3 million smartphones and held 16% market share, which itself was a collapse from 2010 when Nokia still saw massive growth in its smartphone unit and sold 103.6 million smartphones and had 35% market share.

So currently Nokia's smartphone unit holds 3% market share with essentially flat unit sales and declining market share. Its current ranking for Q4 in the Top 10 is definite to be worse than Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Sony, ZTE, LG, Lenovo, HTC and RIM. Yes. Nokia's best possible finish in the Top 10 is ranked 10th. Nokia was on top of the Top 10 when Elop took over two years ago. But Nokia may have tumbled out of the Top 10 smartphone makers altogether like Motorola did last Quarter. The company chasing Nokia into the Top 10 is Chinese Yulong who sell smartphones under the Coolpad brand and they are expected to sell between 6 and 7 million smartphones this quarter, so it will be very close whether Nokia falls out of the Top 10.

Meanwhile for the full year its not quite as bad for Nokia, as they had early 2012 quarters with healthier sales to help boost their rankings. Nokia's 35 million smartphones sold for the year 2012 puts them ahead of Lenovo, RIM, LG and HTC. Nokia cannot finish lower for the full year than 6th biggest smartphone maker, but also, we know it can't catch Samsung, Apple or Huawei, so Nokia cannot be better than 4th. The race is now between Sony and ZTE for whether Nokia finishes 4th, 5th or 6th. Nokia was twice as big as its nearest rivals when Elop took over.

LUMIA, WINDOWS PHONE, SYMBIAN

So Nokia also announced it had sold 4.4 million Lumia smartphones (they didn't give a split of how many of the new Lumia 920 running Windows Phone 8, and how many of the older obsolete Lumia series, hopefully we will have that split in the official Q4 results). But we can obviously calculate the Symbian/MeeGo split out of that, at 2.2 Million non Lumia Nokia smartphone sales. 

So Symbian sales are down 37% from Q3, to 2.2 million. Lumia sales now with the new Windows Phone 8 finally launched, are up 52% from Q3 ie up from 2.9 million to 4.4 million. The 'boost' from Windows Phone 8 is a measerly 1.5 million Lumia units - a true catastrophic disaster when we compare for example to 2010 when Nokia launched a new version of Symbian, S^3 and a new flagship, the N8 (like the Lumia 920 now) and Nokia in the Q4 quarter sold 5 million new Symbian S^3 devices including 4 million N8 devices. And the smarphone market has more than doubled since then. If Elop knew what he was doing, he should have sold at least 8 million Lumia 920 units now - yeah, if the consumers were willing to buy Lumia and the carriers/operators and distribution were willing to sell it haha. The news we had earlier this week via Fortune was that a consumer survey of smartphone owners in the USA and Europe by Bernstein found that the Windows Phone customer loyalty is in the toilet, only 37% of Windows Phone owners are willing to buy another Windows Phone smartphone (compared to 95% for the iPhone or 75% for Android smartphones. No wonder Nokia is now suddenly willing to consider shifting to Android).

So for the first time in five quarters of sales side-by-side, Lumia series finally outsells the remaining Symbian smartphones. And now Symbian does tumble to 6th in the ranking of smartphone operating system sales in Q4 behind Android, iOS, Blackberry, bada and Windows Phone. The end is truly in sight now, Symbian Q4 market share is under 1%.

What of Windows Phone? Nokia has been shipping about 75% of all Windows Phone smartphones recently and there is no reason to think this would have changed for Q4. If we use the same ratio, the preliminary estimate for Q4 Windows Phone total shipments would be 5.9 million smartphones and a market share of 2.4% for the quarter. Yes, bigger than Symbian but nowhere near Blackberry, and very close to losing to bada as well. Windows Phone may be currently either 4th or 5th biggest smartphone OS in Q4. For the full year 2012 it isn't that pretty.

For the full year Symbian sold 18.5 million smartphones and Windows Phone will be somewhere between 15 million and 17 million. bada is going to be bigger than Windows Phone but will chase Symbian. Blackberry is nearly twice as big as Symbian at 33.5 million smartphones and Android obvously won the year and iOS is second. So the rankings of the full-year 2012 look like this: 1 Android, 2 iOS, 3 Blackberry. 4th is race between Symbian and bada. 6th is definitely Windows Phone at 2% market share. So much for your promised 'Third Ecosystem' that was supposed to have 20% market share or better by now haha by so many 'experts'.

MY FORECAST? HALF RIGHT, HALF WRONG

Some Tomi-haters are jeering me for that Kantar numbers analysis I gave. I gave the numbers as Kantar reported, and projected from those what it would mean for Nokia and Windows Phone and Symbian. I said the finding was surprising and I flipped my balance of Windows vs Symbian from what I said in November (two thirds Lumia, one third Symbian) to the other way around. Still, I predicted 6.8 million total smartphones for Nokia, it delivered 6.6 million. Thats almost spot on. I did originally have the mix almost perfectly for Lumia/Windows in November but now did alter it to the wrong mix. Yes. That was a bad call. Still, on the big picture I was very close.

As to Nokia actual performance we have the full story now: Nokia sold smartphones in the following pattern since Elop took over:

NOKIA SMARTPHONE SALES COLLAPSE UNDER ELOP
Quarter. . . . Smartphones . . Market share
Q4 2010 . . . 28.8 million . . . 29%

Q1 2011 . . . 24.2 million . . . 24% (Elop Effect) 
Q2 2011 . . . 16.7 million . . . 15%
Q3 2011 . . . 16.8 million . . . 14% (N9 MeeGo launch)
Q4 2011 . . . 19.6 million . . . 12% (Lumia Windows Phone 7 launch)

Q1 2012 . . . 11.9 million . . . . 8%
Q2 2012 . . . 10.2 million . . . . 7%
Q3 2012 . . .   6.3 million . . . . 4%
Q4 2012 . . .   6.6 million . . . . 3% (Lumia Windows Phone 8 launch)
Source: Nokia quarterly data and TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis
This table may be freely shared

Do you really WANT to go back to all those rosy promises of the Third Ecosystem back in February, March and April of 2011, when so many experts promised Nokia and Microsoft would make magical success together becoming the third ecosystem and have over 20% market share? If you remember, my first official forecast in May of 2011 for the year 2012 smartphone sales suggested Nokia would end the year 2012 at 7.4 million smartphones sold and 3% market share. I did expect Nokia to have migrated 7.0 million Windows Phone sales by Q4 and Nokia only was able to do 4.4 million.

Still, from Spring 2011, I was by far the most pessimistic of any analysts making Nokia or Windows Phone forecasts at the time. Now look at the results? I was TOO OPTIMISTIC. Nokia did even worse than I was able to forecast and NOBODY had published a forecast worse than mine. Do I prove value on this blog?

Then when I had seen how much Elop had mismanaged the Nokia Lumia launch and first Lumia handsets, I did offer a revised forecast for year 2012 sales in June of 2012, where I downgraded my forecast to 5.3 million total smartphones (ok, that was too pessimistic, it was 6.6 million, but the average of these two forecasts was almost spot-on) and my forecast for Lumia sales in Q4 - with the stated clarification, that two Windows Phone 8 based Lumia phones would be launched by November 2012 - said Q4 Lumia sales would be 5.0 million units (was 4.4 million). For the full year 2012 I predicted 19.0 million Lumia shipments (the most pessimistic view in the industry) and Nokia only managed 13.9 million. Again, from June 2012, that was THE most pessimistic Lumia forecast by any forecaster or expert in the industry, and AGAIN I was too optimistic on Lumia.

No forecaster gets it 100% right, that is not possible. But the professional forecasters amongst us try to offer better insights and also - very importantly - to revise forecasts when facts change - AND to EXPLAIN WHY their forecasts have changed. I have done so diligently on this blog, and if you trusted what I said, you were closer to the truth than any other published expert at the time. During the summer of 2012, looking into Windows Phone 8, many of my peers were promising 8 million to 10 million Windows Phone Lumia sales levels. I said 5.0 million, was crucified here for being too pessimistic - and yet, I was the closest to the truth and even I was too optimistic on how incredibly poorly Nokia would perform in Q4.

With that, open for discussions and debates. But people commenting - if you come here to gloat that I was 'wrong' - I will delete your comment without a moment's thought unless you can provide any analyst whose forecast at the time - by May of 2011 or by June of 2012 - had a better number than mine. That Kantar projection was a warning on a usually-reliable early number, and I clearly state now, my revised mix, based on the Kantar numbers, was wrong; but my earlier mix of Lumia/Symbian was spot-on (I should have stayed with the November forecast haha).

PS what will Nokia and Windows Phone look like in smartphones for 2013? The market share will linger in the 2% to 3% range, it will not somehow magically now bounce up to 12% or 16% or 20%. That will not happen. I trust I have enough of a track history of being the most accurate Nokia smartphone sales forecaster that you can trust that prediction. If I'm off, I'm more likely to be too optimistic on Nokia than too pessimistic, but even if I'm off by 100% then Windows will be no bigger than 6% this year. And it won't be that big. And even 6% won't make Windows Phone anything like the, ahem, 'third ecosystem' haha.

For those interested in our crowd-sourced forecast competition from one year ago, those who were guessing Windows Phone to be around 2% or 3% are now the front-runners such as Eldar Murtazin and Jonathan MacDonald. See all contestants in the Twitter-based guessing game here. 

Also don't forget my new series of blogs, telling each Nokia management mistake on this journey to the world record of management failure by Elop, in simple, one problem per blog postings (short ones, honestly) each illustrated with one picture

Part 1 - the Nokia smartphone unit sales collapse following Elop Effect  

Part 2 - The competition during Elop's tenure - Nokia vs Samsung vs Apple iPhone 

Part 3 - the Nokia smartphone sales collapse compared to biggest failures in handset history (Palm, Motorola, Siemens etc) 

And to those who might suggest this disaster was not foreseeable, actually Nokia itself acknowledged all these problems we see now, in its SEC Form 20-F filing to the New York Stock Exchange in March of 2011. All the problems they said might happen - actually did come true. This is the worst disaster in any industry, ever. And if every risk that Nokia anticipated with its high-risk Windows strategy DID come true already, then don't expect any kind of speedy - or even slow - recovery. Nokia is doomed. Or at least, is doomed if Nokia's own risk assessment was this accurate. You judge for yourself, read the updated analysis of Nokia Form 20-F and the truth (with statistics).

Comments

[Tomi T Ahonen]

hi jj, vladkr, m, Bart and Tester

jj - very true. Nokia is always able to force-feed some sales due to its big scale, but where 85% of your attempts to shift from Symbian to Lumia has resulted in customers abandoning the Nokia brand altogether - and only 37% of those who own Windows Phone smartphones are willing to buy a second one to replace the current one - are truly horriffic stats. Windows is utterly doomed in smartphones

vladkr - good point, we obviously won't know yet but at least part of that puzzle is revealed when Nokia reports fully its Q4 results at the end of January

m - good points and remember also, that Elop is great as a con-man, he sounds honest and reasonable, and especially in a country like Finland where con-artists are rare and CEO's are known to be truthful, a liar can go a long way. Elop has been stretching the truth ever since he came to town, all those promises of big Lumia sales that never materialized, including currently the hype around China sales haha

vladkr - the race is not finished yet on the forecasting game. But of CAPTCHA - at least here in Asia I have never seen those types of characters. You might try using another browser, another PC. I hadn't heard of it.

Bart - yes, I've seen that and some carriers report better old Lumia sales than new. Lets hope Nokia gives split in Q4 results (but if its bad for Windows Phone 8, I am guessing Elop wants to hide that haha)

Tester - me too. But again, the smartphone market numbers, that are kind of 'most relevant' to the big Bloodbath battle, those we already have. How badly Nokia is dying of its Eloppian cancer many of us Nokia-fans are curious to know, but that is a side story to this blog... Still, we'll know more when the full results come out

Keep the discussions going, cheers!

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[CN]

@foo

All figures announced today are non-IFRS figures. That tells the operative results without positive or negative one-time costs or gains.

You need to wait until Jan 24 until you see the actual net profit/loss analysis.

[foo]

@P.Bokkelman "Tomi was 75% OFF with his Lumia predictions. Even I was closer (12%). He still tries to praise himself."

Someone commented that obsolete Lumia 800/900 phones are being sold for 150 euros in Europe... that may have helped Nokia to inflate the Lumia figures, while they loose money.

And how did they make a break-even? Selling their HQ, patents... that would give Nokia $250 million dollars to burn in the next quarter.

If this is true, it's not a real break-even. They are still loosing money.

[foo]

@CN - thanks for the clarification!

[khim]

@Tomi: I bet nobody in Nokia -- not even Elop -- would be as precise as Tomi.

No. They will be significantly more precise from that point on. I've worked for the company which had ~3% of market at some point and ~20% or market at another point.

When we had ~20% everyone was able to predict the results pretty precisely. At ~3% estimates and predictions had no relation to reality whatsoever.

Why? Cross-checking. When you go below certain threshold you can not cross-check results with competitors.

Think about it: mistake of 1M more or less will affect Samsung's result by about 2%. Not a big deal: if you make a mistake of 2% per quarter error for two-year prediction is about 15%. Pretty good. But the same mistake for Nokia now means 15% per quarter which means 300% error in two years!

Also random factors: it's hard to imagine that some large customer will buy 1% of Samsung's smartphone production (that's over 500'000 smartphones!), but for Nokia 1% is just about 70'000 smartphones - and there are quite a few companies which can buy similar quantities. This introduces additional noise.

But internally all that data is still available!

When you go below certain threshold people (even extremely knowledgeable people like Tomi!) lose the ability to accurately predict your fate till you grow back (if that'll ever happen).

That's why there are discussion only about Top10 (or Top5, or Top20): not only minnows are less interesting, it's almost impossible to predict how they'll grow or shrink!

[tm]

Hi Tomi,

this is offtopic so feel free to delete after reading, but could you please start removing the post from John Waclawsky (and Duke I believe is same person). It's getting really annoying to read the comments with his 2 sentences all caps in every single post he does and in general feels much more trolling/spamming and most of the time it has nothing to do with anything regarding the topic at hand.

Duke in 'Second picture in the Nokia Destruction Saga' comments e.g.

[Pedling]

I think we are in for a negative surprise when we will see the profits for there Smartphone Devices.

The Average price for a Lumia 800 in Denmark in Q4/12 was about 240€(with Taxes), The Launch was price 530€ (with Taxes in Q4/11)...

This week Aldi supermarket in Belgium has the Lumia 800 for 189€
(I don't know how the Aldi supermarkets are in other countries, besides Denmark, but if you haven't tried buying stuff in an East European supermarket during the cold war period, then you will get a feeling of how it was at that time)

The Average price for a Lumia 900 in Q4/12 was 330€ (with Taxes), Launch Price 530€ in June 2012 (with Taxes).

The average price for a Samsung Galaxy S2 in Q4/12 was 330€, Launch Price 530€ in June 2011.

So Nokia has alot of Discount going on, that I foresee will reflect the there result on the 24 januar 2013...

[CN]

@Pedling

Well, we saw the profits already. Or at least I did. What more do you expect than what Nokia announced today?

[Tester]

The question is, what is genuine profit and what is just clearance of obsolete stock?

The numbers clearly show that WP7 doesn't sell well. So this quarter we have a modest increase and we also see profits. So I wouldn't count out the possibility that they just got rid of their old phones by heavily discounting them. Of course most costs associated with these phones was in past quarters so now they miraculously show up as profit.

[Mika Peltokorpi]

"They didn't give a split of how many of the new Lumia 920 running Windows Phone 8, and how many of the older obsolete Lumia series, hopefully we will have that split in the official Q4 results". Apple does not do it either on iPhones, so why Nokia should bother? Most likely 90% of iPhones sales is from legacy (or as you put it: obsolete) iPhones and this has been clear tactics from Apple. It would be hard to sell to US analysts that iPhone 3GS is part of smartphone marketshare. The US does not count latest Symbian as smartphones, so why they would iPhone 3 gen? (In general the both device categories are considered as smartphones, but quite an often esp. US analysts disregard Symbian in this respect).

And Lumia sales has around 4x YoY making WP probably the fastest growing smartphone platform in history. In this phase iPhone had very similar growth numbers YoY after 12 months since market entry. WP is actually most likely outperforming iPhone at least by 1,5x for the first five quarters (if Nokia has not increased it's market share in the WP ecosystem) And this happens when WP component constraints are wildly speculated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_operating_system

There is, of course some negatives also, but these were major positives you failed IMHO to mention.

You seem to have quite a high smartphone market volume estimate for 4Q (+87% YoY) amid global recession, though at least Nokia and Samsung have given positive warning for 4Q already.

[khim]

Just noticed this sentence: "What of Windows Phone? Nokia has been shipping about 75% of all Windows Phone smartphones recently and there is no reason to think this would have changed for Q4."

Don't you talk ALL THE TIME about the reason for why this change MUST happen? Previously Nokia pushed all these hundreds of millions of Symbian users to Windows Phone (all these talks about "9 out of 10 lost in transtition", etc). But now we have Nokia after TWO years of rapid decline in the industry where handsets are exchanged in 18 months in average! This means that as time goes on Nokia has smaller and smaller army or loyal customers to punish! SIGNIFICANLY SMALLER (it basically shrinks 15-20% every quarter). Which means that it's advantage over other manufacturers goes down (it's still an "advantage" because former Nokia users must pick Windows Phone or go to someone else while with Samsung or HTC they have a choice of Windows Phone or Android).

And that, in turn, means that percentage of Windows Phones sold by Nokia should come down, too! It's hard to predict if Nokia will be at 65% or 50% in Q4 (Tomi is master of numbers, not me), but we should not expect the same 75% as in Q3, that's for sure!

Which means that Windows Phone is in smaller trouble then what Tomi is painting, but Nokia is in EVEN BIGGER trouble!

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi elm, Emmanuel, foo, Firecracker and Cyan

elm - thanks! Yeah, it was even more difficult, as there was no precedent in ANY industry to try this forecast. As we have now witnessed a world record collapse, there was literally no place for any of us forecasters to go to find some model of what might happen and how. Any such previous models, Motorola, Palm, etc would have given far too rosy a picture for Nokia forecasts in 2011 or earlier 2012.

As to 2013, I think the sales will 'stabilize' as the last remaining Symbians are expelled. And there are so few left now, that it won't matter. Then Nokia will have some natural organic growth as the industry grows, so for this year my immediate gut check number is that Nokia now stabilizes into the scale of 6.5 million to 7.5 million for at least the next 3 quarters (Q1, Q2, Q3) and then perhaps slight growth into Q4. The resulting sales means Nokia still falls from the current annual level of 35 million to nearer 25M-30M and the market share falls from 3% now to 2% for 2013. That will be by Q2 almost all Lumias. I'll do a better forecast when we have all data in from the full market, after we have the full Q4 analysis done, but it won't be better or worse than 2%, it won't be as bad as 1%, it won't get to be as good as 3% for the full year. Nokia for the future, is what we now see, as the transition from Symbian to Lumia is nearly complete. This is what Elop delivered on his one-to-one transition. Ten-into-one was the actual result...

Emmanuel - I see Eldar on Twitter, my Russian is so rusty, I tend not to read him in Russian, I wait until some of his blogs are translated into English, so I haven't noticed that he'd gone silent on the blog? Maybe he moved to another blog site?

foo - hey, I meant to write already earlier, I love those pictures, please keep them coming. I have to post about them separately and do you happen to have any place where they are in one place? I'd love to send readers to you. Please everybody, click on the links foo has been providing on the pictures, they are far better than mine

Firecracker - yeah haha, thats what we all want, eh?

Cyan - great point, which is why I really studied that part back in my MBA studies, and worked very deeply with Nokia's econometric modelling team (that was part of my Consulting Department) to build tools and methodologies to specifically anticipate shifts in the trend. Anyone can plot a straight line, that does not require intelligence. But to anticipate the change in the curve, when a growth rate turns into decline, or a decline suddenly reverses back into growth, that is the most challenging part for forecasters. I did of course ace those courses back in the day, and my team back in the Nokia days probably felt the boss was too 'hands on' in their work from time to time but I really did want to learn and help develop very accurate tools - my insights here now, all stem from the work done by Hannu Tarkkanen and all the mathematicians, statisticians, forecasters and modellers at Nokia's econometric modelling staff. So yeah - if you've been following my forecasts over the years, I have both been promising such transition points when they came (usually the most accurate to predict that) and have rejected 'consensus views' of the ending of some trends that some of my colleagues have suggested like the 'saturation myth' that I exposed to the forecasting community back in the day haha..

Keep the discussion going, will return with more comments soon

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Simon]

Can you get information on returns? In California, consumers have the right to return a cellphone within 30 days and cancel the contract. Are there any numbers on how many cellphones are returned by manufacturer?

[Baron95]

Right on schedule, nothing surprising. This is just setting up the stage for 2013, which as I said all along, is when Windows Phone sales would start (as part of the Windows 8 push).

By Q4 Windows dispatched Bada for 4th place and by Q3/2013 it will have dispatched RIM (after the inevitable BB10 bounce) for solid 3rd ecosystem.

And Elop's Nokia stock options and RSUs just went up by 19% today - shareholders are clearly happy with the 19% late Christmas present.

Symbian now joins Meego in the crap pile of failed Nokia OSes.

Life is good - and best of all, is to read all the squirming and thousands of contorted words by Tomi and the disciples trying to hail Meego, Symbian, Bada and Tizen - the crap pile of OSes.

Good luck with that - take some Prozac with it. :)

Holly crap 52% Windows Phone Q over Q sequential growth. Holly crap!!!!! That is incredible. OMG!!! 19% stock bounce. Oh man!!!!

Elop must be laughing so hard at Tomi

[John Waclawsky]

It appears that still, with the latest news

http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/01/10/nokia-lumia-822-windows-phone-8-smartphone-review/

NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE! and this TRUTH has been known for some time, even by the analysts (some history)

http://bgr.com/2012/08/29/windows-phone-analysis-nokia-bernstein/ who says “Our research shows that for MANY YEARS, poor sales of Windows-based phones stem from a deep and stable lack of consumer interest for the product,” ..."What’s the big problem? According to Ferragu, people just don’t want Windows Phones." ...I couldn't have said it better myself.

The fundamentals behind why NO ONE WANTS A WINDOW PHONE have not changed and this IS the primary reason why Nokia is in such a mess.

[John Waclawsky]

Is there any doubt now that Baron95 is a Microsoft astroturfer ....lots of opinions and NO facts only Microsoft talking points... pathetically funny

[Tester]

@all the WP proponents:

Please answer one, only one simple question:

Why is it always 'the coming year' that Windows Phone will take off? Where's the data? Any indicators? I for sure can't find any.

I heard this 2 years ago. I heard this one year ago. I hear this now. And the only explanation I get is 'It's Microsoft, they'll make it succeed'.

The strange thing is, when I ask people about this matter, they all clearly say they wouldn't voluntarily buy a Microsoft product if there is an alternative. They mock Metro as the most stupid interface ever devised. Most already have Android phones, a few an iPhone. I don't know anybody who owns or plans to own a Windows phone.

So why is such an unpouplar system destined to succeed? They only sell stuff due to insane amounts of marketing and sponsoring pumped into the system.

So, aside from the fanboys, who should buy it unless duped into it by false advertising?

[John Waclawsky]

@tester, this microsoft nonsense about waiting for the next iteration has been going on for a lot longer than 2 years. The astroturfers have a play book of talking points:

1) wait for the next version or
2) things will be so much better for Microsoft if we all just patiently wait a few weeks/months ... maybe we need to wait a little longer like a few years/decades/centuries or millennium LOL!!!
3) diminish Google/Android/Linux - it doesn't matter they are all kicking Microsoft butt

It is actually quite entertaining to watch microsoft spend lots and lots of money on astroturfing, lobbying, paying shills, etc. to promote products that no one wants. The moral among the trolls must frightfully low faced with the stark and very harsh reality that NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi foo, CN, khim, tm and Pedling

foo - lets see what the full Q4 results tell us

CN - thanks for the clarification

khim - totally true, the big boys are 'reasonably' easy to analyze and estimate but the tiny players - and if Nokia falls out of the Top 10 smartphones, it is as irrelevant as Motorola has become - they are nearly impossible to estimate accurately by outsiders, unless they serve a very specific market for that analyst to see, like a purely national player, like in China, if that analyst then also is in China and has access to that info.

tm - I hear you, but John makes good points and he has a valid point, totally accurate, the evidence is clear that (most) don't want a Windows Phone. That John perhaps puts it .. strongly .. in his commentary is no reason to remove his comments. I don't mind views from given angles, nothing wrong with that - like for example Baron95's often strong views, as long as you stick to the topic at hand and don't break our normal rules here. So no, I won't delete John's comments

Pedling - yes, we'll see when the Q4 results are out

Thanks, keep the discussion going, I'll return with more soon

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[Baron95]

@Tester Windows Phone is NOT destined to succeed. Nokia has failed. Microsoft has failed. Apple has won and Android OEMs are trying to figure out how to be profitable once the race to the bottom sets in.

Windows Phone is simple the least failed of the non-iOS, non-Android ecosystems. Symbian was a disgrace. Meego was still born. Bada is dying fast with no developers. BB10 is (likely) too little too late.

And I have said since since 2011 that only in 2013 once Windows 8 was out (across Phone, tablet and PC) that anything had even a remote chance of happening.

No one is claiming that Microsoft is or will do well anytime soon. They are simply the least bad of the failed ecosystems/OSes due to Microsoft cash and Windows 8 (desktop/tablet) tie in.

Nothing more, nothing less. I haven't read anyone claim Microsoft will be more than a bit player in phone ecosystems in ages.

Palm/WebOS - dead.
Symbian - dead.
Meego - dead.
Bada - dead soon..
B10 - late, likely to die.
Microsoft - likely to hang on for 5 years + in single digits due to Windows tie in.
Android/iOS - established and thriving.

[John Waclawsky]

More current perspective from Forbes on the Truth that
NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE OR TABLET

http://www.forbes.com/sites/panosmourdoukoutas/2013/01/09/why-microsoft-looks-risky-in-2013/

An interesting quote from the article: "Windows 8, which has a “steep learning curve” and is “frustrating to use with a mouse,” ...also please notice the unusual underlined emphasis in the article

You may also begin to realize the trend that as it becomes more and more apparent that windows phone and windows tablet are failures you will see an increasing number of articles concluding that NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE OR TABLET!

You will love the comments from the Microsoft astroturfers in the article... sheer desperation!

[Pedling]

@Baron95

"Elop's strategy to compete again low cost Android (which are used primarily as feature phones) is spot on with Asha"

Yeah, after the failure of the Lumia 610,that was to expensive for the developing countries, bringing a $200 phone to a $100 market and without Bluetooth file sharing, which are very important.

http://www.neowin.net/news/nokia-plans-to-make-even-cheaper-windows-phone-devices

Haven't seen the cheaper WP model yet?

Thats why Asha... But I don't hope thats Elop's Cash cow?

[Buttface Elop]

So after all, Lumia/Windows Phone, and I am clearly stressing this out, all Lumia models with Windows Phone 7 and 8 both together, had a global marketshare of 0.83% in the fourth quarter of 2012. How can Elop say that this "exceeded their expectations". What expectations? Did he expect to sell no Windows Phone devices at all?

So he also said there might be some profit for the first time with Windows Phone. Well, did he say that the profit will be mainly due to the payments that are coming from RIM?

Sorry, Mr Elop, you're a fool!

[Geektech]

@Baron,
Meego is not near dead, maybe it does not have Nothing in the market now but I think it will and it will be kind of compatible with android, Bb10, Tizen, Firefox and Ubuntu.
That is what Nokia discard and just is a matter of time to see if that was the right way to go, as for now the way Nokia took was the wrong.

[Duke]

More bad news for windows 8. read:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/windows-8-failed-to-reverse-pc-slump-during-holidays/

I agree with Tomi, Windows 8 is a crappy P(OS) that on one wants.