Rating: Whatever happened to Nokia’s MeeGo sales figures
That green lines show Nokia's sales decline
The focus and a very high percentage of the analysis over the last few days has focussed on the battle between Samsung and Apple for dominance in the smartphone sector. With a BlackBerry 10 OS handset or handsets set for release in a few days time [January 30th 2013], RIM has drawn some focus as well. But poor old Nokia frequently get left out in the cold. Even though it did quite well in Q4 2012. That said as the accompanying graph illustrates, 2012 saw a gradual decline in the smartphone market for Nokia.
The latest figures on smartphone sales released by Juniper Research (more details see here) show that Nokia sold roughly half the smartphones in 2012 than it did in 2011.
Nokia’s smartphone shipments reached 35 million in 2012 compared to just over 77 million in 2011 – so sales were down by 54 per cent.
Financially speaking, the Finnish company made a $3 billion loss for the year, but posted a profit of $586 million for Q4 2012.
Juniper says that, “Nokia shipped 6.6 million smart devices in the fourth quarter, with the new Lumia device line still to make a significant impact with shipments of 4.4 million.”
Notice that Juniper uses the phrase “smart devices”. The research company then goes on to say that Nokia’s legacy Symbian based handsets experienced a significant decline, reaching a mere 2.2 million.
But if you add the figures for Symbian to those for Windows Phone (W7 Mango & WP8) you get 6.6 million.
What about sales for its MeeGo based handset – the N9? According to Canalys http://www.canalys.com/ in Q4 2011, Nokia sold 0.6 million MeeGo phones and there was only one model. (See here).
Did Nokia sell absolutely no MeeGo phones at all in 2012, then? If that really is the case – GoMo News doesn’t believe so.
The N9 should have been selling well in Q1 2012 at least.
Anyway, the perceived lack of presence for MeeGo handsets doesn’t augur well for Finnish startup Jolla which we are expecting to showcase a Sailfish (MeeGo variant) based handset @ MWC 2013.
Let’s see how Jolla does, shall we?
Oh & BTW Nokia, here in Blighty [UK] we still haven’t got Windows Phone 7.8 – even though it was predicted to come out in January [2013] and it is now almost February.
It’s almost as if it doesn’t care about its loyal fan base who bough the W7 Mango phones.
