Nokia sold 7.4 million Lumia smartphones in the second quarter, its best yet for sales of the Windows Phone devices, but still made a net loss.
Net sales totalled €5.70 billion ($7.48 billion), down 24 percent year-on-year. The company reported a net loss of €278 million, smaller than the year-earlier loss of €1.53 billion.
During the quarter, Nokia sold 7.4 million smart devices, its term for high-end smartphones, all of them Lumia devices running Windows Phone. That’s 27 percent down on the same period last year, when it sold 10.2 million smart devices: 4 million Lumias and 6.2 million older phones running the company’s now-abandoned Symbian OS. Sales of smart devices dropped more slowly by value, down 24 percent to €1.16 billion, buoyed by a 4 percent rise in average selling price.
Sales of what Nokia calls mobile phones—feature phones and more basic smartphones such as its Asha range—fell 39 percent in value, to €1.41 billion, hit by the same 27 percent fall in volume as smart devices but also a 16 percent drop in average selling price.
Nokia’s operating loss on devices and services has shrunk to €33 million from €473 million a year earlier. The company expects phone sales to pick up in the third quarter, but for operating profit to hover on the wrong side of break-even.
Sales at Nokia Siemens Networks, the network equipment company over which Nokia has now assumed full control, fell 17 percent year on year to €2.78 billion, with the division moving to an operating profit of €8 million from an operating loss of €226 million a year earlier. In the third quarter, Nokia forecasts that the division’s operating margin will rise to between 3 percent and 11 percent.
Nokia’s navigation and mapping division, Here, saw an 18 percent decline in sales, to €233 million, with an operating loss of €89 million, not quite as bad as the year-earlier operating loss of €95 million.