Nokia"s full financial results for Q4 2012 are in, and we bet CEO Stephen Elop (above) is smiling after some good results were announced.
For the quarter, Nokia reported €8.04 billion (U.S. $10.73 billion) in overall revenue, with a final profit of €439 million ($585 million). In the previous quarter, Nokia reported a €576 million operating loss on €7.24 billion revenue, showing that this quarter"s results are quite an improvement.
The strong sales and overall improvement are on the back of 4.4 million sales of their Nokia Lumia Windows Phone devices, as previously reported, up significantly from 2.9 million in Q3 2012. Today Nokia also revealed that the company managed 700,000 sales in a traditionally weak North American market, up 40% compared to the same quarter in 2012. For the entirety of 2012, Nokia also reported that they had sold a total of 14.3 million Lumia smartphones.
Despite strong results this quarter, it didn"t stop the company reporting an overall operating loss of €2.3 billion ($3.06 billion) for 2012, which is indicative of the struggles Nokia faced earlier in the year with their Windows Phone 7 range. Year-on-year overall mobile devices sales are also down by 74% from 335.6 million to 86.3 million, while "smart device" sales (Lumia and some Symbian devices) were down 81% from 35.1 million to 6.6 million.
CEO Stephen Elop said that they are "encouraged that [their] team’s execution against our business strategy has started to translate into financial results", and that the continuing restructuring of the company should hopefully deliver more value to their shareholders in the future.
With rumors afloat that Nokia will unveil new phones at Mobile World Conference in February, there is a chance that Nokia will also have a good start to this year. An aluminium-bodied Windows Phone with a high-megapixel PureView camera will hopefully improve on the generally great Windows Phone 8 foundations that the Lumia 920 made, and continue Nokia"s recent bout of success.
Source: Nokia (PDF) via The Verge