The differences are clear – Apple’s selling phones and associated content faster than Nokia.
Nokia (NYSE: NOK) smartphone shipments grew by 50 percent in the year’s first three months, compared to 131 percent more iPhones reported this week.
But Nokia isn’t juicing the uses for these smartphones – sales from services (ie. Nokia’s Ovi suite) are 12 percent down from last year at €148 million.
Nokia still shifts more phones than Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) – it sold 21.5 million “converged mobile devices” in the quarter, compared with 8.75 million iPhones.
But the first phone powered by Symbian^3 – the upgrade that’s critical to improving an OS that’s now seen as relatively clunky – is now forecast to ship in Q3, delayed from Q2. CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told analysts this is “close to our milestone date” – but shares took a dive.
“It’s a painful thing to delay something a bit,” Kallasvuo said. “But meeting the quality requirements is the right thing to do. It will be more intuitive, more fun and faster.” Analysts piled in with unflattering questions, like: “Can Nokia be fast and big, or just big?”
It must be both, Kallasvuo said. “We are not going for the high end with Symbian only, but also going for the even higher end with Maemo,” he added, somewhat optimistically, referring to the Linux-based smartphone OS.
Operating profit bounced back 787 percent to €488 million on three percent higher net sales of €9.5 billion.
For its coming Q2, Nokia expects 10 percent higher mobile volume across the industry, but expects no higher market share for itself compared with last year.
One thing’s going okay – sales from the Navteq mapping subsidiary are up 41 percent, and Nokia has got 10 million downloads for the free GPS navigation service since introducing in January.
North America continues to be Nokia’s slimmest market – devices and services sales down 27 percent over the year to just €219 million, and its share of the market down 21 percent to just 2.7 percent. But sales grew fastest in Latin America (42 percent) and Middle East/Africa (30 percent).