Nokia Reports €954M Loss for Q4 2011

Today, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of last year, and posted a €954 million ($1.25 billion) profit loss for the timeframe.

Moreover, the company announced that its total loss for the last year was of €1.073 billion ($1.4 billion). Compared to the previous year, the company’s profits went down 43 percent.

The company also announced that its device sales were down 29-percent year-on-year. The company managed to ship only a number of 19.6 million smartphones in the timeframe.

A year ago, the company sold over 28.6 million. Today, its smartphone sales are only half of Apple’s iPhone sales.

Nokia’s gross margin on smartphones went down as well. The company announced 19.9-percent gross margin, down from 28.7-percent last year. It also announced that its smartphone expenses went down by over €150 million.

In Q4, Nokia launched its first Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, which reached a handful of markets before the end of 2011. It also released new Symbian devices in the Asha family.

“Overall, we are pleased with the performance of our mobile phones business, which benefited in Q4 from sequential double-digit percentage growth in our dual SIM business, with particular strength in India, Middle East and Africa and South East Asia,” Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, stated.

“In October, we introduced the Asha 200, 201, 300 and 303, which brought new mobile phones into 76 markets around the world. We are building on this foundation with R&D investments as we continue our journey to connect the next billion to the Internet.”

Sales of Windows Phones were not as high as expected. The company managed to sell over 1 million of them to date, but will have to do far better if it wants to be successful again.

“Also in October, just six months after signing an agreement with Microsoft, we introduced our first two devices based on the Windows Phones platform - the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 710,” Elop stated.

“We brought the new devices to market ahead of schedule, demonstrating that we are changing the clock speed of Nokia. To date, we have introduced Lumia to consumers in Europe, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.”