Mobile phone maker Nokia Oyj on Thursday reported a fourth-quarter net loss of 1.07 billion euros (US$1.38 billion) as sales slumped 21 percent even as the company’s first smartphones running Microsoft Corp’s Windows hit markets in Europe and Asia.
The loss, widened by a 1 billion euro loss booked on Nokia’s navigation systems unit, compares with a profit of 745 million euros in the same period a year earlier.
Nokia said net revenue — including both its mobile phones and its network divisions — fell from 12.6 billion euros in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 10 billion euros, with smartphone sales plunging 23 percent.
Nokia has lost its once-dominant position in the global cellphone market, with phones running Google Inc’s Android and Apple Inc’s iPhones overtaking it in the growing smartphone segment.
The Finnish company is attempting a comeback with smartphones using Windows software, a struggle that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop characterized as a “war of ecosystems.”
Elop said Nokia has sold “well over” 1 million such devices since the launch of the Lumia line in the fourth quarter, in line with expectations.
Including other models, Nokia sold 19.6 million smartphones in the quarter, down from 28 million a year earlier. By comparison, Apple sold 37 million iPhones.
The Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 hit stores in Europe and Asia in November, while T-Mobile started offering the 710 in the US this month. Nokia hopes to boost its poor presence in the US with the higher-end Lumia 900, which AT&T will offer later this year.
Elop said Nokia would be shipping Lumia phones to Canada next month and China and South America during the first half of this year.
“With Lumia, our specific intent has been to establish a beachhead in this war of ecosystems and country by country that is what we are now accomplishing,” Elop said in a conference call.
Nokia shares closed up 2.7 percent at 4.16 euros on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.
Michael Schroeder, analyst at FIM bank in Helsinki, said markets had welcomed Elop’s comments on Lumia sales.
“It definitely alleviated concerns about a horror scenario, expected by some. Although a million is not a lot in the market, it was better than expected,” Schroeder said.
The company said it would not provide annual targets for this year since it was in a “year of transition,” but added that it expected operating margins in the first quarter of this year to be “about break-even, ranging either above or below by approximately 2 percentage points.”
It repeated the target of cutting costs by more than 1 billion euros by next year.
Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics in London said Nokia “was not out of the woods yet,” but its quarterly result was in line with expectations.
“Nokia is not necessarily dead in the water. Profit margins were a bit higher than expected and Nokia has not lost its third position in smartphones, although it is suffering in North America and western Europe,” Mawston said.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”