Nokia Q4 Results: Now Official, Elop has Created World-Record Destruction of Market Share in One Year

The Nokia results are out and they are brutal. It ended up being almost exactly as I predicted back in February. Nokia smartphone market share has crashed to 12% from 29% exactly 12 months ago. As I said, Nokia's smartphone unit went from generating growing profits, to generating increasing losses. And yes, just like I predicted, all of Nokia Corporation was pushed into loss-making.

For 2010 Nokia sold twice as many smartphones as Apple, and by Q4 iPhone was outselling all Nokia smartphones almost exactly by two to one. This is a historical moment. We have witnessed the establishment of a humiliating world record. We have a new definition of colossal corporate incompetence. Mark this day. We can now evaluate the full effect of the Elop Effect.

Here are the Q4 final numbers for the Bloodbath analysis. Nokia sold 19.6 million smartphones for the Quarter and 77.3 million for the full year. A year ago Nokia grew smartphone sales by 45%. Under Elop's management, Nokia replaced the strong growth with a massive decline, dropping 25% when the industry itself had a massive year growing by over 60%.

The market share exactly a year ago at Q4 was 29% and yes, Nokia was so dominant in smartphones, it was not just the biggest smartphone maker, it was literally more than twice as big as its nearest rival and obviously also bigger than its two nearest rivals combined. Nokia was not fighting its rivals like in most businesses where the top 2 players are close in size, like Coke and Pepsi, or like Toyota and General Motors, not like Boeing and Airbus etc. Nokia was TOWERING over its rivals. Literally, more than twice as big as its nearest rival, just 12 months ago!

Since then we had the new CEO Elop on a Rampage of Ruin, starting with the Elop Effect, where he combined the biggest management mistake ever of current product endorsements of the Ratner Effect, with the biggest management mistake ever of future plans of the Osborne Effect. His Elop Effect alone has cost Nokia billions in revenues and profits. I calculated in December that the Elop Effect had already wiped out from Nokia Corporation revenues as big as those of the total revenues Oracle Corporation, and worse, the Elop Effect had destroyed profits as big as the total profits of Google! The equivalent damage was as if a whole RIM ie Blackberry sized hole was cut out of Nokia, just due to the Elop Effect.

Then he continued feuding with his distributor channel, angering Nokia partners and frustrating Nokia supplier chain. The sales not just crashed for Q1 from 29% to 24% but due to Elop's continued mismanagement, Nokia smartphone sales fell throughout the year, down further to 16% in Q2, then 14% in Q3 and now 12% in Q4.

THIS IS A WORLD RECORD OF MISMANAGEMENT

This is not like New Coke. This is not like the BP Oil Spill. This is not like Toyota's problem with brakes. There have been huge disasters in business in history, but nothing like what we witnessed in 2011. Never in the economic history of mankind has there been a global market leader brand, that collapsed so totally in one year. Nokia was growing 45% from 2009 to 2010 in smartphones. Nokia was successfully migrating its 'dumbphone' customers to smartphones, by Q4 of 2010, Nokia had migrated 25% of its handset customers to smartphones while the world had only migrated 22%. All of Nokia's rivals were far behind in that transition, Motorola so badly, they had lost 8 out of every 10 customers they tried to migrate from dumbphones to smartphones. And how did Elop snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Today Nokia's proportion of smartphones is down to 17% - while the industry has reached the point where 29% of all phones sold globally are smartphones!

I cannot emphasize how strategically moronic this is. Previously, up to 2010, Nokia was GAINING customers, as it migrated its customer base from dumbphones to smartphones. The fact was, that Nokia was so successful in designing desirable phones - for Nokia existing customer preferences - that it actually gained customers while migrating them to more expensive smartphones. As long as Nokia was doing that profitably - and it was - that was perfection in executing a transition from a legacy business of dumbphones to smartphones. Elop has now reversed that.

Now Nokia is on a Motorola trajectory, where Nokia customers are actually lost when shifting from dumbphones to smartphones - and alarmingly that rate has been increasing and is now at the rate of two lost for every one retained! Worst of all, now obviously Nokia is doing this generating huge losses in its smartphone unit. Really, readers. It is like Nokia looked at how Motorola collapsed, and Elop came in and said, lets do a Motorola for Nokia but lets just do it much faster. This is strategic: Elop not only destroyed Nokia's today, Elop is also destroying Nokia's tomorrow. And now Nokia is going against the global trend, where the world went from 21% of all new phone sales being smartphones in 2010 to 29% now. And Nokia is going against the grain, shredding its loyal customers as it peddles undesirable smartphones. Nokia's customers are so disgusted - they are more willing to buy a cheap non-smartphone, than a smartphone!

UNPRECEDENTED MARKET CARNAGE

In the past 12 months Nokia has shredded six out of every ten customers it had! This is comprehensive global collapse in the period of one year. Nothing like this has happened anywhere, in any industry. ANd look at past handset rivals. When Motorola collapsed, it achieved something like this, yes, but that happened over a three-year period, not in 12 months. When Palm died, it did it gracefully over a five-year period. Siemens did not collapse like this, nor did Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

From utter market dominance, literally bigger than its two biggest rivals combined, Elop exchanged 29% market share for 12% today. Both Apple and Samsung have already passed Nokia as bigger smartphone makers in Q2 and Q3. By Q4 Apple sold 37 million smatphones, which is a hair less than twice the number of smartphones sold by Nokia in the same period at 19.6 million. This has never ever happened before, in any industry, not in cars, not in TV sets, not in soft drinks, not in detergent, not in running shoes, not in airlines, nowhere! The dominant market leader collapsed in one year and has gone from more than twice the size of its nearest competitor, to about half the size of its strongest competitor. This is unprecedented market disaster!

I warned this would happen and while there were many points in 2011 where Elop could have saved Nokia, he refused to budge. He admitted the sales crash was worse than he expected. His partner over at Microsoft Steve Ballmer has admitted Windows Phone has disappointed dramatically. The past GM of Windows Phone who left Microsoft has admitted that carriers hate Microsoft's mobile activities and in 2011 Microsoft has only made matters worse. Now we have seen how badly Nokia has done with its Lumia strategy.

Note, one year ago at this time, when Elop had been in charge for about five months, Nokia shareholders had appreciated Elop's leadership and the strong performance in the smartphone unit so well, that the Nokia share price had grown by 11%. Since the Elop Effect, Nokia share price had fallen by more than half. Nokia's shares were rated one notch below perfect at this time last year. Since then all three ratings agencies issued a series of downgrades and Nokia is now rated junk. Nokia's brand was consistently one of the 10 most valuable brands on the planet. Elop's actions dropped the Nokia brand out of the Top 10 for the first time ever.

I am not suggesting that somehow Nokia was perfect - the previous management under Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo had damaged Nokia well from its peak value years ago. But that damage had been reversed, Nokia was strongly in recovery mode by Q4 of 2010. I am not attempting in the least to suggest Symbian was going to somehow save Nokia, the decision was taken long before Elop came along, that Symbian woiuld be replaced - and I had written on this blog many times why that was the right thing to do. Nokia's problems were with execution, not its smartphone strategy. I wrote for example this a year ago, about Nokia problems in execution and marketing. Elop was hired to fix execution problems, not to destroy its smartphone unit, as Chairman Jorma Ollila clearly stated when Elop was announced in early Autumn 2010. 

As Nokia was plunged into generating big losses last year, Elop has been since selling various Nokia assets to try to keep the company afloat. He has tried to sell the NSN unit and currently is trying to sell the Vertu luxury phone unit. He has already sold several batches of patents, and just sold Nokia's handset factories in Romania. He also has been firing staff, more than 10,000 were let go already, and we just heard another 13,000 will be fired next. This guy is destroying Nokia as we knew it.

COMPARE THEN AND NOW

One year ago, exactly this time Q4 results, this was Nokia smartphones, compared to today:

ITEM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Q4 2010 . . . . . . . . Q4 2011

Smartphone unit sales . . 28.6 M . . . . . . . . . 19.7 M
Unit growth YoY . . . . . . 45% . . . . . . . . . . . minus 31%
Average Sales Price . . . 154 Euro . . . . . . . . 140 Euro
Smartphone Revenues . . 4.4 B Euro . . . . . . 2.7 B Euro
Smartphone profits . . . . 510 M Euro . . . . . . minus 190 M Euro
Market Share . . . . . . . . 29% . . . . . . . . . . . 12%
Smartphone migration . . 25% . . . . . . . . . . . 17% 

If you thought RIM was having trouble, it is nothing compared to this. In every way Nokia has seen an epic collapse and please understand, there is no bigger story in mobile, this is a WORLD RECORD in market collapse. Please also remember the recent analysis by Horace Dediu at Asymco blog, that in mobile, once your handset maker degenerates from profit-making into loss-making, there is no recovery. The history is clear about that from Siemens to Ericsson to Palm to Motorola. Not only that, we also see that Nokia's corporate loss of 1.1B Euros (about 1.4B US dollars) was actually 250 million dollars bigger in its operations - yes, the Q4 period included a 250 million cash payment from Microsoft to try to prop up CEO Stephen Elop and his mad Microsoft strategy. Yes, Nokia's losses in reality based on its actual market performance are far worse. And that loss goes to the smartphones unit which in reality generated nearly a 400 million Euro loss if this Microsoft cash injection is removed. And then, yes, the Microsoft 'strategy' - can it save Nokia? No.

LUMIA IS A FAILURE

Nokia refuses to give actual Lumia sales numbers. So does Microsoft. We can see from that, that both companies are ashamed about the lack of traction and fear reporting the number. Note, a year ago Microsoft proudly published its 2 million figure. Since then Microsoft has admitted that Windows Phone sales have declined from quarter to quarter. Now we know that 'to date' by January 26, Nokia's Lumia has sold 'well over 1 million Lumia devices to date'. That more than 1 million was achieved in the three months from November to end-of-January. The Q4 sales will be significantly below 1 million, and analysis of the Nokia launch markets for Lumia sugggest about 600,000 total Lumia sales in Q4. That compares to an equivalent launch of Nokia's then-new operating system, the S^3 release of Symbian, which sold 4 million units in Q4. When adjusted for the market growth in 2011, that would mean 6.4 million sales now. But under Elop's management his Microsoft Madness strategy has yielded a success rate of one TENTH of what Nokia did a year ago with the 'obsolete' Symbian and the then-flagship smartphone N8.

Note Nokia refuses to give us a sales number for N9 sales using the MeeGo OS. That means MeeGo has outsold Lumia. And we have an independent analysis which says MeeGo sold 1.4 million units in Q4. This is particularly relevant, as the MeeGo countries of N9 launch were selected to be very tiny smartphone markets like New Zealand, Singapore, Norway, Nigeria and Kazakhstan. I will do my analysis of what is the equivalent performance of the MeeGo platform vs Lumia phones by Nokia, in a separate blog shortly. It is disappointing to find that Elop refuses to celebrate the huge success that the N9 has been in horrid conditions and with no top management support.

WINDOWS PHONE WILL NOT SAVE NOKIA

First of all, I have of course given my review of the first Lumia smartphone and why it will fail as a flagship phone, whether Nokia intended it as such or not. Then I gave a detailed analysis of where and why Lumia is failing in the market once we had market data. I have given my forecasts of what the years 2012 and 2013 will look like for Nokia and Lumia. And of course, I will revisit those forecasts and give you my latest revised picture based on these latest Nokia numbers. But lets not use my numbers. We have seen now two forecasts for Nokia Lumia success potential, by Morgan Stanley and iSupply. Lets see how plausible these are and what they tell us.

The Morgan Stanley forecast is the one you may have seen promising 37 million Lumia sales this year. The iSupply forecast is the one that promised Windows Phone to pass the iPhone by 2015 and achieve 17% market share. Lets examine briefly these two forecasts.

MORGAN STANLEY SUGGESTS LUMIA ONLY 7% BY END OF 2013

The Morgan Stanley forecast from January 2012, said Nokia Lumia sales would hit 37 million this year 2012 and 64 million in 2013. They add also Symbian sales so total Nokia smartphone sales would be 77 million in 2012 and 80 million in 2013. Note - first of all, that Morgan Stanley clearly expect that somehow Nokia can stem the decline in smartphone sales last year (of 23%) this year to be flat sales this year, and a slight growth of 5% next year for all Nokia branded smartphones. Secondly, Morgan Stanley expects that Nokia can still sell 40 million Symbian smartphones this year 2012 and 16 million next year. I think these are very rosy expectations (especially, now in light of Nokia Q4 results, when Elop clearly said he no longer expects Symbian to sell those promised 150 million more units he committed to last February) but lets assume Morgan Stanley's forecast is close to accurate. What do these numbers mean?

Morgan Stanley's forecast of 37 million Lumia sales in 2012 means 5% market share this year and the 64 million Lumia sales for 2013 suggests 7% market share by next year! This is success? I fear not. What when we add in Symbian sales. Morgan Stanley's projection suggests Nokia total smartphone sales this year 2012 would see a further drop in market share to 11% this year and down to 8% in 2013. If you think Nokia who dominated smartphones last year, would have 8% next year, and thus according to this optimistic forecast, Nokia would have expelled three out of ever four customers it ever had - that is the very definition of corporate suicide. (and I think this Morgan Stanley projection is too rosy)

iSUPPLY EVEN BASE NUMBERS ARE WRONG

Lets turn to iSupply. Just now in January, IHS iSupply gives the projection for Windows Phone sales (remember, not only Nokia provides WP7 smartphones, also Samsung and HTC offer a token few smartphones in that space but both obviously give preference to Android). They project Windows Phone to have 1.9% in 2011, then 9.0% in 2012, then 15.3% in 2013, 16.1% in 2014 and 16.7% in 2015. They do not separate Symbian sales out of the numbers, but just to see how implausible these numbers are, lets look at the other 2011 numbers. iSupply has estimated the iPhone to be the 'loser' to Windows Phone. They start with iPhone to have 18.0% in 2011. The reality is, that Apple achieved 20% market share in 2011. So the difference in iSupply's forecast in 2015 is literally one tenth of one percent between iPhone and Windows Phone, but iSupply starts by punishing Apple by 2 full percentage points! Then the growth? Apple grew 2 points in 2011 and currently in Q4 with the new iPhone 4S, Apple is selling 25% of all smartphones globally! Meanwhile iSupply felt that that Apple would be flat in 2012? That is perhaps a fair projection if iSupply thought that Apple's sales were flat in 2011, but Apple grew 2 points. Why would the iPhone then fall in 2012?

But look at iSupply's number for Windows Phone in 2012, this year. Last year all Microsoft partners sold about 5-6 million smartphones in total (remember, MIcrosoft itself was so afraid to give the number they started to count both the new Windows Phone sales with the older and incompatible Windows Mobile sales last year - and still in Q4, Windows Mobile was outselling Windows Phone in Microsoft's best market, the USA, as we found from Nielsen Q4 new sales measurements). Now lets say it was 6 million in 2011. Then suddenly iSupply feels that this year 2012, that will suddenly explode to 63 million? TEN FOLD INCREASE IN ONE YEAR? On what planet? The only manufacturer who will focus on Windows Phone will be Nokia and Morgan Stanley in their optimistic view only counted about half that number for Nokia Lumia sales. Android did not explode 10-fold in the third year of its sales. Apple's iPhone did not explode 10-fold sales in its third year. There is no precedent for this outrageous forecast. And even if it were to be true, EVEN if it were to be true, then by the end of 2015, four full years from now, the total Windows Phone family of handset makers would have achieved selling one out of every six phones worldwide, and Nokia would have some slice of that pie. A year ago Nokia alone was selling one out of every three smartphones sold globally.   

We have seen that Nokia's biggest smartphone launch ever, with the biggest market support, with the biggest artificial creation of demand, as Nokia's Symbian based phones were almost extinct from handset stores; with the biggest marketing expenditure Nokia had ever done for smartphones; combined with hundreds of millions of more marketing support from Microsoft's deep pockets - to the degree that in the UK for example consumers got free Xbox videogaming consoles if they bought a Nokia Lumia 800 smartphone - yet the sales in Q4 were well below one million (and likely about 600,000). Kantar measured Q4 sales for Lumia and in no major market did Lumia pass even 2% sales of smartphones - these were Nokia's best markets where Nokia's market share a year ago was between 35% and 60%. Now the Lumia sales have failed to succeed, to the point that Nokia is already slashing prices to sustain what sales remain. Do not delude yourself, Lumia cannot save Nokia.

I will return with more Nokia analysis but these Q4 results are devastating. We did witness a world record in corporate management. Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop took the world's strongest smartphone maker brand and ruined it in one year. He replaced strongly growing sales and 29% market share with 12% today, projected to hit 8% next year. He took strongly growing revenues and profits, and replaced them with declining revenues and big losses. Most of all, he managed to reverse the trend of migrating Nokia customers from low-cost dumbphones to smartphones - now Nokia is literally bleeding customers when they come to replace a phone, for the first time ever, Nokia's market share in smartphones is worse than in dumbhones - and worse than the global migration to smartphones. Last year one quarter of Nokia's customer base had been migrated to smartphones, where the future of the mobile phone business exists. Today Elop has scared those customers away, and only one in six customers of Nokia phones select smartphones. He will be studied in MBA courses as the case study of the greatest management failure of all time, and no doubt, many will arrive at the same nickname as I use for Stephen Elop: he is the Microsoft Muppet. The Nokia Board must fire him immediately before he ruins what is left of Nokia.

PS - I have now added the calculation of Lumia sales for Q4 (600,000 units) - compare it to N9 MeeGo sales of 1.75 Million - both launched in the same quarter and you can sense my frustration with Elop. 

PS PS - I now added also the regional split calculation with some stunning customer acceptance findings. But read the Lumia sales blog first (the above link) 

Comments

[C]

Hi Tomi,

Would you not say that the state of affairs is due to the crazy arrogance and mismanagement of OPK and JO before Elop?

The missed opportunities? the missed trends? I would argue that if no change had been made there would be no future for Nokia, whereas now, they have a future in what will be a bigger ecosystem than iOS.

As for the staff cuts, there is a huge amount of dead wood in this and any company that went through a dot com growth trajectory like that, its just a readjustment to market realities.

Bye,

C.

[jo]

I am not sure if i should feel good or bad for nokia are they reading this numbers? How cant they tell elop was wrong and they should fire him right now.
And congrats your % market was on spot

[cycnus]

Tomi,

Once again, you show us why Forbes say you're the best.

I also very curious on why the nokia board were so blind. Are they bribed? threaten? drunk? drugged? or simply idiot?

@C.
Nokia was had the BEST ecosystem.
They have QT that were used to build apps for Linux/Unix.
They have QT to glue Maemo and symbian together so the transition to Maemo would be easy.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi C, Tomifan, jo and cygnus

C - I said VERY clearly that problems existed before Elop. Read the blog!

As to trends, Nokia set the trends and Elop admitted as much - come on, Apple admitted as much for stealing Nokia patents and then agreeing to pay Nokia. Does your phone have NFC or dual SIM? Nokia had an app store four years before the first iPhone etc. I am not suggesting Nokia was always perfect in its execution, but on trends, Nokia set the trends, not missed them.

Tomifan - fair point. But regardless, the evidence is now fact. The year 2011 did see Nokia set a world record in destruction of a global leader in its market. All marketing professionals say that market share matters (as long as you are profitable) and this will be seen as the biggest marketing blunder of all time. Maybe I don't know the internal stuff at Nokia - bearing in mind I am an ex-Nokia exec and they still use me as a consultant a decade after I left and one of my books is a official Nokia book - perhaps I do know haha.. But the facts are now irrefutable. This is a failure. The biggest ever.

jo - thanks. But yes, we should all weep. Nokia was destroyed in 2011. Now its a question can some of Nokia be salvaged before it is all gone.

cygnus - thanks. I am totally puzzled about the Board too. Ollila has now been replaced, it seems he didn't care anymore last year. Truly a shame as he would have been remembered as the great man of mobile phone handsets, this last episode tarnishes his reputation. He should have stepped in last Autumn and fired Elop...

Thank you all for the comments

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[N9]

Some are saying the N9 sold up to 2 million units.....

[jo]

@C
windows phone is a dead platform, no way its ever gotta be bigger than iOS. unless apple fuck it up like nokia is doing in it now. looking at their numbers they doing better than nokia.

nokia right now only chance is brand name push windows phone, but it never gotta grow enough to recover marketshare and profits, symbian on had.

true, symbian was on the dead bed, but if pr1.2 meego is a sign that its feature wise better succesor to symbian than windows phone will ever be.

no point having dualcore with windows phone when there no multitask to take advance of it, or features , games that push it. and likely will ever be.

[cycnus]

@Tomi

In Allaboutsymbian, someone point out that nokia say that from the PDF.... the sale of Symbian smartphone in Q4 is declining compared to Q3... Therefore the number of N9 could be guess at least 1.5 Million.

cut and paste from AAS:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/14122_Nokia_Q4_2011-in_the_heart_of_.php#disqus_thread
---
"Did you read the report at all? Symbian sales in Q4 declined. Q3 was 16.8 smart devices. No N9 and Lumias were on sale back then, page 9.

Sales for symbian declined in Q4 over Q3 so even if you leave the symbian sales at 16.8m eventhough it declined.
19.6-16.8=2.8
1.3m Lumias 2.8-1.3=1.5m Nokia N9."

[elm70]

@Tomi, @All

Too easy jump on Q4 number and say Nokia Windows Mobile was a disaster.

Before it was already know that Nokia WM phone could not be more then 4m unit produced for Q4.
Analysts predict already around 1M unit sold for Q4, and this was based on production capacity.

So it was impossible for Nokia sell more WM phones due to production limit.

The big problem is the increasing decrease of sales of other Nokia phones, clearly mainly due to the Elop Effect (eFlop)

Tchuss

e_lm_70

[Bob Shaw]

This is an extract of an article by Kevin Tofel on Nokia at Gigaom.

"You can’t overlook what Nokia has done in the 11 months following Elop’s pronouncement of massive change. The company quickly retooled its hardware and software for Microsoft’s platform. It has won a number of awards for its new devices and actually got people at the Consumer Electronics Show talking about Nokia for the first time in recent memory. It hasn’t announced devices only to have people wait six months to buy them. And it has two carrier partners in the U.S. in AT&T and T-Mobile.

The important part is this: for now, Nokia is delivering on all of its promises; something I can’t recall happening for a number of years prior. And that, at least, gives it — and to an extent, Windows Phone — a fighting chance."

[Doug]

Hey Tomi, your blog and mynokiablog.com are really good!

Do you think there's gonna be an N9 successor since it most likely beat the Lumia?

[Anonymous coward]

@Doug

I was told at a Nokia event, quite directly, there will be no N9 successor regardless of how well it's received by the market. MeeGo is dead and a Linux-based featurephone OS for developing markets is its successor-in-spirit.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi N9, jo, cygnus, elm and Bob

N9 - yeah, I've seen that. I will do my best to collect best info and we should know at least in early February when the big analyst houses report

jo - good points

cygnus - yeah, I noticed, and remember, Lumia didn't sell 1.3M units. That is what analysts expected. If Nokia could have confirmed 1.3M number (or more) would have said. When Nokia said more than 1M, and the Nokia analysts had expected 1.3M its sure the number was significantly less than that

elm - this first launch of Lumia was the biggest smartphone event since at least the launch of the N-Gage (world's first consumer-oriented smartphone) for Nokia. And Elop could choose absolutely everything about it - and messed it all up. He launched in Europe, but didn't give them an European-style phone but rather one that was US-oriented. And that first Lumia 800 phone will not even launch in the USA at all. What a total moron. He had all the time, all the money, all the Nokia competence to make everything perfect. A year ago, the N8 was rushed to the market as a severely delayed phone and had only normal launch marketing among big portolio of other Nokia phones. And it did 4M sales. If Elop was half-competent, with the hundreds of millions from Microsoft, he should have sold twice what N8 did.

Tomi Ahonen :-)

[jo]

@Bob.Shaw

all the awards are due design same awards nokia n9 got, not beause windows phone.

windows phone is a huge failure.

[Doug]

Thanks for the reply Tomi!

So there's only going to be one smartphone OS in the future for Nokia, that is, Windows Phone, since MeeGo is dead and Symbian expires in 2016?

I really like the N9 especially the Swipe UI and buttonless front.

I'm going to move to Samsung if Nokia only uses Windows Phone as its only smartphone OS.

[Heron]

There's still Meltemi.

Nokia's real problem is that it came to the market too late. Market share is fine and all, but what is needed is profits.

The return to profitability is key for Nokia if it wants to show that it is still relevant. The rumored AT&T launch date of 18th March will not help WP7 numbers much in Q1, so I do expect losses to continue. Q2 and Q3 will be the decider of Nokia's future with AT&T, and how other carriers will go forward with the Lumia push.

And of course, Apollo. Will that be the game changer?

[Earendil Star]

If you read the press on the Nokia results, everything seems to shine.

"Above analyst expectations"

"Lumias sold well above 1 million" says THT Elop

OK, MS and Nokia paid for that. Yet, even for Microsoft, these numbers are something to be ashamed of. No wonder Ballmer did not even mention it. And if you read some comments around, even readers do not seem to believe the official propaganda.

Just consider that Lumia had -presumably- some pent-up demand, owing to the usual THT Elop (absurd) strategy of promising well in advance products that will only be sold after several months. The result? 1 million Lumias? 1/4 of the N8 on the beleaguered, clumsy, outdated Symbian platform????
When just to be on par (market-share-wise) it should have sold 7 million????

I agree with Bob Shaw's quote of Kevin Tofel that Nokia finally was able to deliver... unfortunately it did on the wrong strategy. "For now" is not an option for Nokia in a market that evolves every few months. Whatever comes out will only be good for MS (not too difficult to rise from a 1% worldwide market share for WP...) but a bloodshed for Nokia. Nokia stopped fighting the moment it hired THT Elop. From that moment on, the fight was taken over by the softies.

Meanwhile Nokia is selling its plants (the latest in Romania). Probably the idea for the future is to outsource production completely to the likes of Compal.

MS is already thinking about new moves to prop its WP platform. This could come from jettisoning WP7 and introducing the new WP8, with kernel & bits taken over from the forthcoming Windows 8 (developers will be happy of the additional workload if this is true :-). The move is to try and leverage once again on its stronghold: the PC market. This is really a crucial moment for MS. Unless it gains traction in the market of the future (ARM based smartphones and pads) it may well have reached its descending trajectory. And MS does not fare comfortably when it's deprived of its monopolistic ecosystem: how can you coerce OEMs, Retailers and Industrial Partners to force feed customers with your products, when you are no longer the Lord of the game?

[elm70]

@former Nokia

From morons to criminals

I don't forget OPK stating laud and open that N8 was the last Symbian well ahead it will be on shops shelfs, a moronic statement that effect N8 sales and open the ground for kill Symbian from eFlop

Tchuss

E_lm_70

[Poifan]

Tomi, what makes the 800 "U.S. Oriented"? It certainly can't be the hardware as its pretty much the same as the N9 (unless you are saying the N9 shouldn't be launched in Europe ;) ). The WP7 OS is the same everywhere. Of the Nokia addons Drive is pretty universal; and the music app cannot be used in the US (content licensing) but can in much of Europe.

[switch-hitter]

@cygnus
Good point but the 1.3M stated for WP7 was to the end of January, the figure to the end of Q4 was likely to be around 600,000.

This makes the figure for the N9:
19.6-16.8 = 2.8
0.6m Lumias
2.8-0.6 = 2.2m Nokia N9

So even adjusting for the fact Lumia was only around for half that Quarter it seems the N9 was still outselling it on a day to day basis.

As far as I can see there was never any reason to believe WP7 would be a success for NOKIA, quality manufacturers like samsung, HTC and LG had already tried and failed with it.

The limited functionality combined with the expensive hardware requirements of WP7 also make it a poor fit with NOKIA's existing customer base who will be used to getting more for less, it seems inevitable to me that these customers will look at Android devices as their most natural progression.

Personally I think I'm going to hang on to my Symbian phone until either Tizen or Ubuntu enter the arena, none of the present options look very interesting to me.

[Matti]

Its amazing how well N9 sold. Considering things like it being taken behind the barn and shot before arrival, limited release, limited marketing, 3rd party developers abandoning it (no apps), Microsoft didn't give you a free X-Box for buying it etc, etc.

And they gave it up for a platform that consumers had already abandoned. Never thought that Nokia could find worse CEO than OPK. Congrats for Ollila in proving me wrong.