Nokia bullish on smartphones despite poor results

Nokia is remaining upbeat despite second quarter financial results that showed a 66 per cent drop in profits and falling orders.

The company reported that sales revenues were down 25 per cent, with handset shipments falling 15 per cent, indicating heavy discounting on prices. However, the company did say that sales were up on the last quarter, indicating that the worst may be over for the company.

One bright spot in the report was that Nokia has increased its lead in the smartphone market, the most lucrative end of handset sales. The company's market share was up thee points to 41 per cent.

"Nokia put in a solid performance in what was another tough quarter. Competition remains intense, but demand in the overall mobile device market appears to be bottoming out. As before, we are continuing to tightly manage our operating expenses,” said Nokia's chief executive in a statement.

“We are balancing short-term priorities with our longer-term growth ambitions as elements of the mobile handset, PC, internet and media industries converge to form a new industry. Consumers will increasingly expect devices and services designed as integrated solutions. To capture this opportunity we are accelerating our strategic transformation into a solutions company."

Nokia is going to be ramping up its promotions of the Ovi store, Dr. Tero Ojanperä, the company's executive vice president of Services. On September 2nd the company will be making new announcements about development tools for its Ovi store and will begin a major marketing push for the site.

“We will be kicking in for the Ovi store to get a bigger marketing push,” he said.

“This includes integrated billing with 27 operators and localising it in five languages. We've made good progress but have small details to iron out before the big push.”

He continued that the smartphone market share was very good news, since it was the most important market for handsets in the future. While there was strong growth in the developing world in low end firms smartphones were the future for more developed markets.