Nokia has published quarterly results that show it’s been overtaken by Apple in terms of smartphone sales.
For the second quarter of its current financial year, the company made net sales of 9.3 billion Euro (around £8.15 billion; down 7% from the same period last year). Operating profit excluding special items was 391 million Euro, down 41% year-on-year. Overall, the company showed a loss of 487 million Euro.
16.7 million smartphones and 71.8 million other mobile phones were shipped in the three-month period. These figures are down from Q2 last year by 34% and 16% respectively. In comparison, Apple recently confirmed quarterly sales of 20.34 million iPhones worldwide.
Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, said “The challenges we are facing during our strategic transformation manifested in a greater than expected way in Q2 2011. However, even within the quarter, I believe our actions to mitigate the impact of these challenges have started to have a positive impact on the underlying health of our business. Most importantly, we are making better-than-expected progress toward our strategic goals.”
“Thus, while our Q2 results were clearly disappointing, we are executing well on the initiatives that are most important to our longer term competitiveness. Some progress is already evident, and thus we are targeting to end this year with more net cash and liquid assets than at the end of Q2 2011. We firmly believe that our deliberate and unwavering commitment to making the changes necessary at Nokia is the right way to deal with the disruptive forces in our industry and drive value creation for our shareholders.”
[PDF results]