The company posts €826 million ($1 billion) operating loss

Jul 19, 2012 11:28 GMT  ·  By

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has just announced its financial results for the second quarter of the current year, posting an increase in unit shipments when compared both to the previous three-month period and to the second quarter of the last year.

During the three-month period ending June 30th, 2012, Nokia managed to increase its Nokia Lumia smartphone volume to 4 million.

Moreover, the company announced total sales of 73 million handsets, up both on a quarterly basis and year-in-year.

However, Nokia is still facing challenges. In fact, it posted overall net sales down by 19 percent when compared to the last year’s second quarter, and Device and Services sales down both quarterly and annually.

For the three-month period, the company posted total operating loss of €826 million ($1 billion), offset by licensing royalties and payments coming from Microsoft.

In the end, the company announced a net cash increase of €102 million (around $125 million). The handset vendor ended the quarter with gross cash of €9.4 billion ($11.5 billion) and net cash of €4.2 billion ($5.15).

Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, commented on the results, saying that the quarter was a harsh one for the company, but that they are working hard on strengthening competitiveness and improve the operating model.

“We shipped four million Lumia Smartphones in Q2, and we plan to provide updates to current Lumia products over time, well beyond the launch of Windows Phone 8. We believe the Windows Phone 8 launch will be an important catalyst for Lumia,” Elop said.

“During the quarter, we demonstrated stability in our feature phone business, and enhanced our competitiveness with the introduction of our first full touch Asha devices.”

“In Location & Commerce, our business with auto-industry customers continued to grow, and we made good progress establishing our location-based platform with businesses like Yahoo!, Flickr, and Bing. We continued to strengthen our patent portfolio and filed more patents in the first half of 2012 than any previous six month period since 2007,” Elop also added.

He also stated that the third quarter of the year announces itself to be difficult, and that Nokia would focus on bringing the Devices & Services business to profit once again. You can have a look at Nokia's full financial announcement via this link (PDF file).