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| Nokia Lumia sales dropped 28% last quarter |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-10-18 10:56:34 |
| Things ain't going well for Nokia. Their quarterly results are - again - a disaster, and Lumia sales have dropped 28% (50% if you look at just the US). Windows Phone 8 is really going to be a make-it-or-break-it kind of thing. If it doesn't go well, the company might consider going back to focussing on rubber boots. |
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| RE[2]: win8 |
| By przemo_li on 2012-10-18 13:01:36 |
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Actually WinP7 devices from Nokia had good performance. But PR disadvantage in perceived one. "Quad core MUST be faster than single core, right?" But than, Lumia 920 is priced like iPhone, but have lower specs, not to even mention SIII from Samsung.... So again Lumias will LACK performance compared to others. |
 - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by Loreia |
| By przemo_li on 2012-10-18 13:03:44 |
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NOKIA DO NOT NEED US MARKET. ITS 5TH MARKET IN HANDSET SALES. BACKWATER IN OTHER WORDS. Now EU or Asia would be good. |
| - Score: -1 |
| Expected |
| By TBPrince on 2012-10-18 13:04:38 |
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It was expected, IMO. Users knew for months that old Lumias couldn't get v8 so it was expected that sales could drop and drop a lot since smartphones users, expecially in a niche like Windows Phone, tend to be more conservative (many of them have already been burned by phone makers not to support newer OS versions). Still those Lumias are great devices. They only need to get more apps because, after all, it's all about apps. I recentely switched from Galaxy SII to Lumia 900 (wanted to wait for 920 but had the chance not to pay that phone) and, apart from apps number, there's no turning back to me, not even to SIII which I had the chance to get. Plus, Lumia users will get sort of WP7.9 with more functionalities from WP8 than regular users, according to Nokia itself. We all knew this was going to be a mid-term strategy. And if I was Microsoft and Nokia, I'd pour millions into buying or funding developers to release hundreds or thousands of great apps because that's the difference today. The only thing MS and Nokia are doing plain wrong is to wait for independent developers to become active and make apps because while they think about that, platform will lag. Create 50-100 great apps and phones (and platforms) will sell like bread... |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Expected |
| By XenonXZ on 2012-10-18 13:43:08 |
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For me apps don't mean a thing, I want a stable, reliable OS, Symbian, Maemo, Android are, Windows Mobile isn't... and never has been! I used a Lumia 8/900 for a while, tbh they are very nicely designed phones, the OS failed to perform as good as expected, IE: Lockscreen freeze for like 5 secs, frequent freezes.. (After almost a week uptime, but that's no excuse) Still using my N900, along with my "free" upgrade galaxy s2 for work. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Comment by smashIt |
| By butters on 2012-10-18 13:43:27 |
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Why should Microsoft buy Nokia? They seem perfectly capable and surprisingly eager to run their own industrial design shop and deal directly with the contract manufacturers like Apple does. Microsoft doesn't want the Lumia brand to subsume the Windows brand. If they can't much buy-in from the other handset vendors, then they'll just go vertical instead. It's time for Nokia to make their next desperate platform misstep. For example, Yahoo poached Google's SVP of mobile location services and made her their new CEO, so they might be looking for a handset partner that isn't joined at the hip to Android. If there's anyone desperate enough to bet on Yahoo making a dramatic recovery, it's Nokia. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[2]: Comment by Loreia |
| By Bill Shooter of Bul on 2012-10-18 14:06:11 |
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Yes, however, they are spending a ton of money promoting them in the US. The US based reviewers have a disproportionate reach with their reviews. If they don't like it and people in the US don't buy a heavily advertised product the word will spread to the other market places pretty quickly. I understand you'r point in terms of sheer phone volume, but I'm not sure I would classify the home country of both of the leading phone os' as well as the one nokia is selling as a "backwater". Surely the home market for windows devices matters for the premier windows phone developer? |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By BushLin on 2012-10-18 15:02:24 |
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Come on... let's call it what it is: The Elop effect (Osborne effect + Ratner effect) ;) |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[2]: Comment by MOS6510 |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-10-18 15:22:24 |
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I knew about Osborne, but after I posted the Wikipedia link I noticed Elop gets mentioned at the end. Hum, Elop and "the end". They do seem like a nice match. Still it's hard to imagine Nokia going from #1 to going bust in just a few years. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Comment by Loreia |
| By oskeladden on 2012-10-18 15:46:50 |
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> NOKIA DO NOT NEED US MARKET. ITS 5TH MARKET IN HANDSET SALES. BACKWATER IN OTHER WORDS. Now EU or Asia would be good. Unfortunately, their sales also fell from 15.9m units to 5.8m in China - a decline of 64%. It's even worse in terms of net sales by value, where it declined by 74% year on year, and 49% on just the previous quarter alone. The EU showed a decline of 29%. Even Latin America - which on the figures showed a 14% rise year on year in terms of value - actually saw around 100,000 fewer handsets sold. They need some markets, surely? |
| - Score: 4 |
| Comment by Nelson |
| By Nelson on 2012-10-18 16:17:14 |
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While Lumia sales decreased, it was expected. Its been sunsetted by Carriers with little or no advertising left, Nokia has announced new devices, so naturally it will lead to a decrease. They still sold 3 million of the things, down from around 4 million the prior quarter. This is the first time _since_ launch that there hasn't been Quarter over Quarter increases in sales. About a year in, that's pretty impressive. They also sold 6.5 million Asha Touch phones, which is encouraging. This I believe, more than Windows Phone, is the line up that can end up being a life boat for Nokia. Also impressive is Nokia's cash conservation. They actually posted a non-IFRS profit of ~$78 million iirc. non-IFRS meaning when you take out one time charges like pensions or severance pay which is not really structural debt. I think under Elop a few good things have happened: - Streamlined the company. Yes, there were job cuts, but they were needed. Nokia was absolutely massive and a big part of their cash problem was not scaling down fast enough. A lot of inefficiencies. - Got devices to market relatively quickly. The Lumia line got out to people pretty fast. They sold millions of them over the course of the year, and established some real mindshare with their Lumia brand. - Improved the Windows Phone ecosystem by leaps and bounds. Got key 2nd Parties to ship flagship apps, landed a bunch of exclusives. They totally dominated in the evangelism story here. Sure, there were missteps along the way. The Lumia 800 was a non targeted blind push to Carriers. There is still retail sales channel training to be done. Etc. They're relatively small mistakes though, in the grand scheme of things. I think with Windows Phone 8 there are a few enabling things which will make Nokia have a better time: - More H/W diversity in screen resolutions, SoC, sensors, etc.. More experience engineering for Windows Phone. - OS which has largely caught up in features and apps. Remember since Nokia has joined, 100,000 apps have been added to WP7. Up from 20,000. WP8 will only accelerate this by having API parity with Windows 8. - Carriers know Lumia, know it reviews well, Nokia has a beach head in the USA. - HTC and Samsung are investing more in WP8 which will grow the ecosystem and mindshare as a whole. There are still a lot of uncertainties, but Nokia is in a better position than they were a year ago. I expect their stock will tick up a bit due to their cash conservation. /armchair analyst |
| - Score: 5 |
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