Bad luck Nokia: Your Next Billion is saying No Thanks

You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, but Nokia‘s looking more scrambled than anything else today. Some number crunching after Nokia’s warning of worse-than-predicted financials for Q1 2012 reveals quite how badly the Finnish company’s legacy business is crumbling: the same business that Nokia was relying on to keep it afloat during the Windows Phone transition. The headline figure: a mere 83 million handset sales, down from 108.5m a year ago.

Nokia’s mobile phone division – which makes basic dumbphones – has always been the volume side of the company’s business, versus the “smart devices” team pushing out smartphones. In Q1 2012, Nokia apparently sold 71m mobile phones and 12m smart devices; of that 12m, around 2m were Lumia Windows Phones, the remainder running Symbian of one version or another.

The company blamed “competitive industry dynamics … particularly in India, the Middle East and Africa and China” for the slump in sales, though that shouldn’t have come as too great a surprise. Nokia warned that the so-called developing markets it had counted on for steady turnover was declining faster than expected back in January.

“Changing market conditions are putting increased pressure on Symbian” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said at the time, highlighting that in “certain markets, there has been an acceleration of the anticipated trend towards lower-priced smartphones with specifications that are different from Symbian’s traditional strengths.”

Slashgear.com