back to article Nokia turns a PROFIT. Sort of

Nokia announced a pre-tax profit of €375m for the fourth quarter of last year today, suggesting the deep cuts of the past year, including the axing of around 20,000 employees, have allowed management to steady the ship. The profit included sales of its corporate HQ and $250m support payments from Microsoft. Group net sales in …

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  1. FartingHippo
    Thumb Up

    Good.

    Now if only RIM can plug the holes in their own sinking ship, we might have the makings of a decent competitive, innovative phone market.

    Monopoly very bad; duopoly quite bad; quadropoly probably ok.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Good.

      Plenty of innovation happening on the Googly side, no problems there. In the last year we have had some great Nexus devices for a very competitive prices.

      The only people calling out are those onboard the RIM hindenberg or the Windows Phone titanic...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Good.

        Do you think Google would be innovating if there weren't any competition?

        A monoculture is a bad thing, competition is to be encouraged.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Good.

          "A monoculture is a bad thing, competition is to be encouraged."

          You should do that on the desktop

    2. LarsG
      Meh

      Profits?

      Profits at the expense of people.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Profits?

        "Profits at the expense of people"

        Or

        A bankrupt company at the expense of everyone, not just a few. I know what I'd go for, given a choice. Also, those people who have been made redundant will be getting really rather good redundancy payments.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Good.

      RIM don't even know their head from their arse.

      If you request some info (like I did) following the contact email-adresses on their website then all you get is a meaningless automated message telling you to use the "appropriete channels". Even the webmasters emailaddress give the same automated nonsense.

      Fuck RIM. At least the folks at Nokia have the decency to answer potential consumer requests for product info.

    4. hewbass
      FAIL

      Re: Good.

      No need.

      Samsung have Bada. That easily takes 3rd or 4th place, without Nokia/MS having hoist themselves out of the ditch.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Amazing!

    Company makes losses people say it is bad.

    Company makes profit and people still say it is bad.

    Sure, they've sold less phones but they're selling them for more and generating a higher profit. Surely if a company is "failing" then nobody would want to buy a more expensive phone from such a company? I don't call making more money from less phones bad.

    1. Martin Budden Silver badge
      Headmaster

      less ≠ fewer

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        What an outstanding spot of pedantry. Even deployed the correct "does not equal" symbol rather than the usual "!=" or, even worse, "=/=" of the riff-raff.

        Fine stroke Sir.

        Duly upvoted.

  3. Phoenix50

    BEEP BEEP BEEP

    Paging Mr Eadon....

    ....Mr Eadon you're needed immediately for an anti-Microsoft posting.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: BEEP BEEP BEEP

      Last I saw of him he'd mistakenly wandered into an article about a Ms Hotty Tops in Texas who's suing to get saucy pics of herself removed from the interwebs. Haven't heard a peep from him since. I'm starting to worry the poor sod may have gone blind.

    2. eulampios
      Thumb Down

      downvoting for your

      blatant anti-Microsoft, anti-ballmerean and anti-elopean posting!

  4. Jess

    so basically if they hadn't axed symbian

    they would have done better.

    1. A. Coatsworth Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: so basically if they hadn't axed symbian

      I just got a massively discounted Nokia 700. It's a nice little smartphone that uses Belle. It does what I need it to do and is actually very pleasant to use, barring a few minor hiccups when I unlock it.

      But after all it's already 1 year old, and watching it I can't stop thinking *what could have been* if Symbian continued alive. It's really, really sad

    2. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

      Re: so basically if they hadn't axed symbian

      Jess,

      If they'd have kept Symbian, they'd almost certainly have sold more phones. However, there's a big 'but' in here. They weren't making very much profit on their Symbian phones, and the year Elop dumped it, they were getting lower margins on each Symbian sale. So it's possible they might have made a loss on higher sales. In general, profits are better than losses...

      It's a hypothetical - unless you have access to a time machine. Could Symbian have survived the £100 Androids, some of which are now quite good? It's impossible to know. From the hideous way RIM's sales have fallen off a cliff in the last 2 years, it's entirely possible that Symbian might not be selling any phones at a profit now (or even at all), or Nokia could still be making a few quid per phone on 50 million handsets. It's even possible that Elop could have beaten up on middle management and got some of Nokia's great R&D through the production pipeline and got Symbian up-to-date by now. He obviously didn't believe that.

      1. hewbass
        Trollface

        Re: so basically if they hadn't axed symbian

        Are they actually making any profit on the Lumia phones at all though? I thought they were sold at a large loss.

        My understanding was that profits were from the Asha line of phones...

        1. Richard Plinston

          Re: so basically if they hadn't axed symbian

          > Are they actually making any profit on the Lumia phones at all though? I thought they were sold at a large loss.

          I did see a figure, probably for up to Q3, that that the Lumia range made a 47% loss for Nokia. But that counted in startup costs. The problem is that these were for WP7 so they needed another lot of startup costs for WP8 Lumias which are quite different.

      2. Jess

        Re: so basically if they hadn't axed symbian

        > They weren't making very much profit on their Symbian phones

        And they are on the Win phones? I notice the quality drop with the windows phones compared to an N8. Downgraded camera, lack of SD support. I'm pretty sure they lack the connectivity too. So if they wanted to make bigger margins, they could have done the same. Quite frankly the first range of Lumia phones were pathetic in comparison to the N8, when I asked questions at a stand the rep seemed quite embarrassed about the answers he had to give. Perhaps the newer ones aren't as bad.

        > Could Symbian have survived the £100 Androids, some of which are now quite good?

        Why not? It's not like they need to pay for it. Win Phone has little hope.

        > It's even possible that Elop could have beaten up on middle management and got some of Nokia's great R&D through the production pipeline and got Symbian up-to-date by now. He obviously didn't believe that

        And of course we all believe that too.

        1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge

          Re: so basically if they hadn't axed symbian

          I read (I think one of Orlowski's articles?) that the original Lumia's weren't built by Nokia, but were outsourced. Not sure if that was design as well as manufacture. Although the lack of SD cards was down to Microsoft. I believe WP8 now supports them, whereas WP7 didn't. HTC seemed to use them as cheap (non-removable) storage for some reason. Did MS change the spec at the last minute perhaps?

          I've also seen suggestions that Nokia over-ordered, hence having a bunch of phones left over in Q3 last year, that they had to dump pretty sharp-ish. We were looking at an upgrade to the company mobiles and we could pick up Lumia 800s very cheaply, at the same price as some of the crappy Android 2.3 cheapies that were still knocking around last year.

          It'll be interesting to see if Nokia can keep the current Lumia range around their current prices, or if they'll have to discount heavily in order to keep the sales going. My impression is that a lot of their sales were the Lumia 710 last year, which was released at £300, but I suspect sold mostly between £150-£200. I certainly saw it on sale at those prices a lot. Bought mine for £130. The hardware ought to have been pretty cheap, and it's fine for what I paid for it - though not spectacular. And I don't think it was ever worth £300.

          It would be interesting to see some proper figures from Nokia. They've paying big license fees to MS, but then they're getting a $1billion 'support' payment. I wonder what they were paying for the hardware? The Lumia 800/900 looked well enough built, the 710 and 610 much less so.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    All aboard

    the titanic is about to depart....

    woo hooo.....

  6. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So....

    Whole company makes €375m pre-tax for the quarter,

    Nokia Siemens made €251m

    Leaving a total profit for the whole of the rest of Nokia of €124m

    Microsoft paid them $250M (€187m)

    So the rest of Nokia (including their wonderful phone division) made a loss of €63m

    And this is supposed to be good .....

    1. Joe Montana
      FAIL

      Re: So....

      Not only that, but they sold their HQ, which is a one-off boost to earnings. In subsequent years they will be paying to rent it back from the new owners, who will actually want to make a profit from their investment.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So....

      Not only that -- they also sold their headquarters for €170m, and then there's all the patent payment they're receiving...

  8. jonfr
    FAIL

    Still not going to buy Nokia Windows phone

    I am still not going to buy Nokia Windows phone. Not going to happen. Nokia is about to fail. They are going to be missed.

    1. Manu T

      Re: Still not going to buy Nokia Windows phone

      I couldn't care less whther Nokia "is about to fail" or not. I need a phone with proper full 2 way call recording and the only devices that can accomplish this without hacking/cracking/jailbreaking/rooting/or any other way of tampering are Symbian phones.

      In fact people should care less about whether company X does this or that! You have requirements, you buy a phone that fulfill these requirements. Period. You don't buy a company. You buy a bloody phone. It has 2 years consumer warranty and it'll probably keep working after that.

      You still call and get called. You'll still send SMS- or get SMS-messages. These are the 2 main basic things that ALL phones do. No matter what "ecosystem" or company-health and I doubt that will change.

      But I guess we all love fart-apps (and the various variants of the various fart-apps). Oh dear.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Still not going to buy Nokia Windows phone

        I know it doesn't help much as it's even harder to find than Symbian, but the N9 does the recording job nicely. Actually I have it record all my calls, just in case. Haven't really needed it much though.

      2. Richard Plinston

        Re: Still not going to buy Nokia Windows phone

        > the only devices ... are Symbian phones.

        """The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia."""

        Note the past tense 'was'. This may mean they have stopped that too, after selling 2.2 miliion symbian's last quarter.

        > It has 2 years consumer warranty and it'll probably keep working after that.

        A warranty does not mean that the phone will keep working, it means that if the phone fails then the company will fix or replace it. If the company fails the warranty is useless.

        So, yes, you _do_ 'buy the company'.

    2. Martin Budden Silver badge
      FAIL

      Re: Still not going to buy Nokia Windows phone

      If everyone applies your logic then yes Nokia will fail. On the other hand if everyone buys a Nokia then Nokia will do very well indeed.

  9. Wang N Staines

    2 consecutive year losses ... a year after, sold assets and cut jobs - a miracle, it turns a profit with a massive cash injection from its backer. Apple and Samsung need to learn from Nokia.

    1. rcorrect
      Mushroom

      Just curious

      What exactly do "Apple and Samsung need to learn from Nokia"

      1. Craig 2

        Re: Just curious

        Sarcasm?

      2. Robert E A Harvey
        Headmaster

        Re: Just curious

        How not to do it?

  10. Andus McCoatover
    Pint

    As predicted last year....

    NSN is the keel on the Good Ship Nokia. A couple of years ago, I'd have predicted NSN's demise. I'm happy that I can say that I was totally and absolutely wrong.

    @jonfr - you are so wrong!!! You simply don't know Finnish mentality. They aren't gonna fail. Look up the Finnish word SISU. The Finns defeated an army more than 30 times greater than them in the Second World War. Finns have got 'guts'.

    (Pint, 'cos most Finns are pissed in the evening...)

    1. Daniel B.

      Re: As predicted last year....

      I don't want Nokia to fail, I really don't. But if they're going to really return to profitability and previous grandeur, they must sack Elop and restart their OS R&D. The previous smartphone maker that went in bed with MS was Palm. We all know what happened there.

      1. MacroRodent
        Happy

        Re: As predicted last year....

        > and restart their OS R&D.

        Not sure if it really makes sense for Nokia to have their own OS, but they definitely need one with more control over it. Currently Microsoft seems to dictate way too much of what can go into a Windows phone, which inhibits innovation. Wonder if it would help to raise a motion at the upcoming AGM about adopting Android? Would be shot down of course (like other harebrained motions that are a tradition the Nokia brass has to endure once a year in Helsinki).

      2. Andus McCoatover
        Windows

        Re: As predicted last year....

        Neither do I. It'd be a tragedy for the country I now live in, that I love. I want Nokia to succeed, and Elop's NOT the person to do it. (OK, prior to Palm who went 'in bed with MS' was Sendo. We SURELY know what happened to that!!!)

        Yep, Elop must go. But then... Underpants Gnomes? No. Like the current encumbent, they couldn't work out step 2) to get to step 3 - PROFIT!!!

        Jorma Ollilla. It's his baby, after all. "Jorma, come back to the creche - we need you!"

    2. Miguel 1
      Thumb Up

      Re: As predicted last year....

      I'm also gladly surprised that NSN did well, that's some hope for the European telecom engineering business.

      But I would not make any conclusions from old wars: pick almost any country, and you'll be able to find past victories if you go back in History far enough...

    3. hewbass
      Terminator

      Re: As predicted last year....

      Microsoft must be 30 times Nokia's size now.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They made a profit!

    Which is more than Amazon, Google, Starbucks and Vodafone...... At least the good people of Finland can look forward to them paying their share of tax.

  12. RonWheeler

    Ashas could save them

    Featurephones with decent build quality and that run for over a week on a charge, round the £50 mark and that don't do lots of stuff most people don't need. Wot's not to like?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    shouldn't it be clear by now...

    ... that punters DON'T WANT Nokia Windows Phones?

    They want Symbian, Harmattan, Android everything BUT Windows Phone!

  14. Hi Wreck
    Unhappy

    Mark Twain said...

    History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme (cough Nortel cough).

    New CEO to save company (Zafirovski/Elop). Check.

    Cut staff. Check.

    Cut product lines. Check.

    Cut dividends. Check (this one is the kiss of death.)

    It's sad to see.

    1. Shaun Blagdon
      Linux

      Re: Mark Twain said...

      This is the first quarter Nokia has ever paid a dividend actually

  15. Schultz
    Thumb Down

    The current trajectory ...

    will see Nokia collecting patent fees and using the money to pay contract termination compensation to the last employees + pension liabilities.

    Really, they use IP income, MS bribes, and the family silver to pay the bills and there is no improvement in sight: They gave it a good shot with some shiny phones and a brand new operating system for the 2012 Xmas season but they fell short. What will they offer in 2013 to improve on the current situation? Unless they develop the ultimate battery for that charge-once-use forever smartphone, they won't have a shot. 2013 will see BB try to pull the trick that Nokia / MS didn't manage in 2012.

  16. Chris Parsons

    Lumia 920

    Just bought one, love it. Got it cheap on ebay. It does everything I want, and does it well. I do hope Nokia survive.

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