Nokia turns a PROFIT. Sort of Nokia announced a pre-tax profit of €375m for the fourth quarter of last year today, suggesting the deep cuts of the past year, including the axing of around 20,000 employees, have allowed management to steady the ship. The profit included sales of its corporate HQ and $250m support payments from Microsoft. Group net sales in …
RIM don't even know their head from their arse.
If you request some info (like I did) following the contact email-adresses on their website then all you get is a meaningless automated message telling you to use the "appropriete channels". Even the webmasters emailaddress give the same automated nonsense.
Fuck RIM. At least the folks at Nokia have the decency to answer potential consumer requests for product info.
Amazing!
Company makes losses people say it is bad.
Company makes profit and people still say it is bad.
Sure, they've sold less phones but they're selling them for more and generating a higher profit. Surely if a company is "failing" then nobody would want to buy a more expensive phone from such a company? I don't call making more money from less phones bad.
I just got a massively discounted Nokia 700. It's a nice little smartphone that uses Belle. It does what I need it to do and is actually very pleasant to use, barring a few minor hiccups when I unlock it.
But after all it's already 1 year old, and watching it I can't stop thinking *what could have been* if Symbian continued alive. It's really, really sad
Jess,
If they'd have kept Symbian, they'd almost certainly have sold more phones. However, there's a big 'but' in here. They weren't making very much profit on their Symbian phones, and the year Elop dumped it, they were getting lower margins on each Symbian sale. So it's possible they might have made a loss on higher sales. In general, profits are better than losses...
It's a hypothetical - unless you have access to a time machine. Could Symbian have survived the £100 Androids, some of which are now quite good? It's impossible to know. From the hideous way RIM's sales have fallen off a cliff in the last 2 years, it's entirely possible that Symbian might not be selling any phones at a profit now (or even at all), or Nokia could still be making a few quid per phone on 50 million handsets. It's even possible that Elop could have beaten up on middle management and got some of Nokia's great R&D through the production pipeline and got Symbian up-to-date by now. He obviously didn't believe that.
> Are they actually making any profit on the Lumia phones at all though? I thought they were sold at a large loss.
I did see a figure, probably for up to Q3, that that the Lumia range made a 47% loss for Nokia. But that counted in startup costs. The problem is that these were for WP7 so they needed another lot of startup costs for WP8 Lumias which are quite different.
> They weren't making very much profit on their Symbian phones
And they are on the Win phones? I notice the quality drop with the windows phones compared to an N8. Downgraded camera, lack of SD support. I'm pretty sure they lack the connectivity too. So if they wanted to make bigger margins, they could have done the same. Quite frankly the first range of Lumia phones were pathetic in comparison to the N8, when I asked questions at a stand the rep seemed quite embarrassed about the answers he had to give. Perhaps the newer ones aren't as bad.
> Could Symbian have survived the £100 Androids, some of which are now quite good?
Why not? It's not like they need to pay for it. Win Phone has little hope.
> It's even possible that Elop could have beaten up on middle management and got some of Nokia's great R&D through the production pipeline and got Symbian up-to-date by now. He obviously didn't believe that
And of course we all believe that too.
I read (I think one of Orlowski's articles?) that the original Lumia's weren't built by Nokia, but were outsourced. Not sure if that was design as well as manufacture. Although the lack of SD cards was down to Microsoft. I believe WP8 now supports them, whereas WP7 didn't. HTC seemed to use them as cheap (non-removable) storage for some reason. Did MS change the spec at the last minute perhaps?
I've also seen suggestions that Nokia over-ordered, hence having a bunch of phones left over in Q3 last year, that they had to dump pretty sharp-ish. We were looking at an upgrade to the company mobiles and we could pick up Lumia 800s very cheaply, at the same price as some of the crappy Android 2.3 cheapies that were still knocking around last year.
It'll be interesting to see if Nokia can keep the current Lumia range around their current prices, or if they'll have to discount heavily in order to keep the sales going. My impression is that a lot of their sales were the Lumia 710 last year, which was released at £300, but I suspect sold mostly between £150-£200. I certainly saw it on sale at those prices a lot. Bought mine for £130. The hardware ought to have been pretty cheap, and it's fine for what I paid for it - though not spectacular. And I don't think it was ever worth £300.
It would be interesting to see some proper figures from Nokia. They've paying big license fees to MS, but then they're getting a $1billion 'support' payment. I wonder what they were paying for the hardware? The Lumia 800/900 looked well enough built, the 710 and 610 much less so.
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Whole company makes €375m pre-tax for the quarter,
Nokia Siemens made €251m
Leaving a total profit for the whole of the rest of Nokia of €124m
Microsoft paid them $250M (€187m)
So the rest of Nokia (including their wonderful phone division) made a loss of €63m
And this is supposed to be good .....
I couldn't care less whther Nokia "is about to fail" or not. I need a phone with proper full 2 way call recording and the only devices that can accomplish this without hacking/cracking/jailbreaking/rooting/or any other way of tampering are Symbian phones.
In fact people should care less about whether company X does this or that! You have requirements, you buy a phone that fulfill these requirements. Period. You don't buy a company. You buy a bloody phone. It has 2 years consumer warranty and it'll probably keep working after that.
You still call and get called. You'll still send SMS- or get SMS-messages. These are the 2 main basic things that ALL phones do. No matter what "ecosystem" or company-health and I doubt that will change.
But I guess we all love fart-apps (and the various variants of the various fart-apps). Oh dear.
> the only devices ... are Symbian phones.
"""The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia."""
Note the past tense 'was'. This may mean they have stopped that too, after selling 2.2 miliion symbian's last quarter.
> It has 2 years consumer warranty and it'll probably keep working after that.
A warranty does not mean that the phone will keep working, it means that if the phone fails then the company will fix or replace it. If the company fails the warranty is useless.
So, yes, you _do_ 'buy the company'.
NSN is the keel on the Good Ship Nokia. A couple of years ago, I'd have predicted NSN's demise. I'm happy that I can say that I was totally and absolutely wrong.
@jonfr - you are so wrong!!! You simply don't know Finnish mentality. They aren't gonna fail. Look up the Finnish word SISU. The Finns defeated an army more than 30 times greater than them in the Second World War. Finns have got 'guts'.
(Pint, 'cos most Finns are pissed in the evening...)
I don't want Nokia to fail, I really don't. But if they're going to really return to profitability and previous grandeur, they must sack Elop and restart their OS R&D. The previous smartphone maker that went in bed with MS was Palm. We all know what happened there.
> and restart their OS R&D.
Not sure if it really makes sense for Nokia to have their own OS, but they definitely need one with more control over it. Currently Microsoft seems to dictate way too much of what can go into a Windows phone, which inhibits innovation. Wonder if it would help to raise a motion at the upcoming AGM about adopting Android? Would be shot down of course (like other harebrained motions that are a tradition the Nokia brass has to endure once a year in Helsinki).
Neither do I. It'd be a tragedy for the country I now live in, that I love. I want Nokia to succeed, and Elop's NOT the person to do it. (OK, prior to Palm who went 'in bed with MS' was Sendo. We SURELY know what happened to that!!!)
Yep, Elop must go. But then... Underpants Gnomes? No. Like the current encumbent, they couldn't work out step 2) to get to step 3 - PROFIT!!!
Jorma Ollilla. It's his baby, after all. "Jorma, come back to the creche - we need you!"
I'm also gladly surprised that NSN did well, that's some hope for the European telecom engineering business.
But I would not make any conclusions from old wars: pick almost any country, and you'll be able to find past victories if you go back in History far enough...
will see Nokia collecting patent fees and using the money to pay contract termination compensation to the last employees + pension liabilities.
Really, they use IP income, MS bribes, and the family silver to pay the bills and there is no improvement in sight: They gave it a good shot with some shiny phones and a brand new operating system for the 2012 Xmas season but they fell short. What will they offer in 2013 to improve on the current situation? Unless they develop the ultimate battery for that charge-once-use forever smartphone, they won't have a shot. 2013 will see BB try to pull the trick that Nokia / MS didn't manage in 2012.
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