Thursday, April 20, 2006

Nokia more than outperforms!

Nokia's net profit rose 21% in the first quarter, on strength in its mobile phone and multimedia divisions, and its global market share increased to 35%.

The Finnish telecom-equipment maker earned €1.05 billion ($1.29 billion), or 25 European cents a share, compared with €863 million, or 19 cents a share, in the year-earlier period. Sales jumped 29% to €9.51 billion from €7.40 billion.

Both earnings and revenues were considerably above analyst expectations. This was also the first time in a few years that Nokia has achieved a sizeable jump in market share. Nokia and Motorola seem to be distancing themselves from the other handset makers as both achieved strong volume gains.

Nokia's N70 Multimedia device was it's best seller for the quarter and provided evidence that Nokia's new higher end devices (including cameras and music players) are starting to pay off - both in developed and developing markets.

Nokia's weak spot was it's network division and Enterprise division - which proves that RIM's Blackberry is still the device/service to beat. Given that both Nokia and Motorola's network divisions are struggling - perhaps they should spin them off and merge them. They more than likely need the scale now that Alcatel and Lucent are merging and Ericsson is strengthening.

No comments: