Struggling mobile phone maker Nokia has suffered another massive quarterly net loss – over 1.53 billion euros – as it tries to claw its way back to a place among the big boys.
Suffering in the smartphone battle against Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy models, the Finnish firm is counting on its new Lumia handsets which run Microsoft software.
The Lumia’s quarterly sales doubled from a low base in the previous quarter to four million – a long way behind Apple’s 30 million and Samsung’s 50 million smartphones.
Clinging onto cash
The good news was that the company, which has been burning through money at a rate that would clean it out in a couple of years, managed to cling on to more of its cash reserves than the market had feared. That gave the battered stock a 12 percent boost.
The shares had fallen around 80 percent since February 2011 when new Chief Executive Stephen Elop announced a shift to the largely untried Microsoft Windows phone operating system.
The company is trying to improve its finances by cutting 10,000 jobs globally and focusing spending in areas like research and development that it hopes will generate a payback.
Grim forecast
Nokia forecast its third-quarter loss in the phone business would be just as steep as the second, an outlook that was worse than industry watchers had expected.
“I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally fixed,” said Lee Simpson, analyst at Jefferies & Co.
In the third quarter, Nokia will also struggle to sell its Lumia phones, which are already exuding a whiff of obsolescence after Microsoft announced a software upgrade that will not apply to existing Windows phones.
Text: euronews.com
(20.07.2012)