Mobile Leadership Strategies

Even with its upcoming release of the Windows Phone 8 Lumia devices, Nokia has still been facing tough times. In its Q3 report, the smartphone manufacturer reported a loss of €576 million, a 19 percent fall in third-quarter revenue year-on-year.

ZDNet is reporting that the company currently has net sales of €7.2 billion, and Nokia has seen a distinct fall in the number of smartphone handsets sold. The smartphone manufacturer sold just 6.3 million smartphones in Q3, down a whopping 63 percent year-on-year, while the rest of its handset sales fell 15 percent. Nokia did note that it hopes its new line of Lumia devices will provide more enticement to the brand, but said it expects the fourth quarter to be a challenging one.

Yankee Group Senior Analyst Boris Metodiev comments

“The demise of Nokia has been spectacular. Once the leading mobile phone manufacturer for 14 years in a row, now the company is on the brink of collapsing, following years of bad decision making and mismanagement. The company has always been good at building a decent phone, but never really cared about the OS supporting it. At the time when Apple launched iPhone and Google developed Android, Nokia never invested properly at improving its own Symbian OS and eventually decided to drop it completely and commit to Windows Phone. That looked like the right decision—Microsoft needed a good device manufacturer and Nokia didn’t want to be one of the many Android followers. Then came the announcement that no Windows Phone 7 devices would be able to update to Windows Phone 8. That practically killed the perspective sales of Lumia 900, which was supposed to be Nokia’s flagship phone.

Now Nokia is hoping to bank on its new ‘flagship’ phone Lumia 920 and the success of Windows Phone 8. Even if that is a match made in heaven, it’s unlikely to generate huge amount of revenue right away. There will be a stiff competition from the undisputed market leaders iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy SIII, and also from other Windows Phone 8-based devices from manufacturers like Samsung, Huawei, HTC and ZTE.”