The company confirmed a $754 million (€576 million) operating losses

Oct 18, 2012 12:06 GMT  ·  By

Once world’s top mobile phone handset maker, Nokia has just announced its Q3 2012 financial results. At first glance, things might look grim, but if we look back at the reports published in the previous quarters, it looks like there’s some improvement.

According to the newly published financial results, Nokia suffered $754 million (€576 million) operating losses, which is not that bad if we take into consideration the fact that the Finnish company reported a $1.01 billion (€770 million) loss in Q2 2012.

Furthermore, the handset maker reports it has sold 2.9 million Lumia units, down from 4 million units last quarter.

Sales of Asha handsets were strong in Q3, as the company sold no less than 77 million units, from which 6.5 million were full touch smartphones.

“As we expected, Q3 was a difficult quarter in our Devices & Services business; however, we are pleased that we shifted Nokia Group to operating profitability on a non-IFRS basis. In Q3, we continued to manage through a tough transitional quarter for our smart devices business as we shared the exciting innovation ahead with our new line of Lumia products,” said Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO.

Although Nokia had a bad Q3 when it comes to Lumia sales, the results were to be expected due to the announcement of the new Lumia series powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 platform.

The bad news is that once these new Lumia smartphones will go on sale, the “old” models, which are still solid products, will probably be forgotten due to the fact that they won’t receive a Windows Phone 8 update.

There’s no doubt about it, Nokia’s recent financial results is bad news, but there’s room for improvements and from what we’ve noticed, the company is losing less and less money.

Hopefully, the new range of Lumia products will push Nokia in the right direction. More details on Nokia’s financial results are available here.