Nokia announces Q2 09 financials, profits down 66%

Nokia announced their latest financial data for the 2nd quarter of 2009 and as expected with the current world economic situation most all of the numbers were down. However, it seems that their profit numbers were down even further than hoped as other mobile phone manufacturers and operating systems continue to hammer away at Nokia sales and Nokia has to drop prices of their higher end phones to keep sales volume up. The one bright spot of the report is that Nokia worldwide smartphone market share went up to 38% from 37% from the last quarter, but is still down quite a bit from the days of 60%+ market share just a couple years ago.

Nokia showed a net profit of 380 million Euros with sales of 9.91 billion Euros and shipping of 103 million mobile phones. With profits down 66 percent, compared to 1st quarter data, selling millions of low cost “feature phone” Nokia devices is not going to turn a huge profit. I think Nokia’s Eseries and Nseries with the S60 UI are starting to look a bit outdated compared to the flashy iPhone, WebOS, and Google Android operating systems and devices. While the S60 platform is amazingly customizable and functional, we are seeing that consumers want an easy UI even more than functions and features. Maybe this is more of a US-based opinion, but the US is a large and influential market so Nokia does have to pay attention to it.

The disappointing thing, from my perspective, is that Nokia hasn’t made any announcement, posted any viral videos, or even hinted that there is a major update to the UI used on Nokia devices coming anytime soon. I know that there are brilliant people working at Nokia and that they have to see what these three latest mobile operating systems are doing to the market. Windows Mobile, RIM BlackBerry, and S60 are all looking long in the tooth and even if the companies believe their UI is just fine they need to look at what consumers are buying and step up to the plate with a revamped UI. I KNOW that Nokia could rock the world with a UI running on Symbian and maybe we will see something that does just this from the Symbian Foundation work. However, I think the Symbian Foundation is still a bit of a mystery to “normal” people and I still struggle myself to get a handle on what it means for the future.

You can view the entire report, with tables, in PDF format.