Nokia has released in Q2 financial results today. The overall results are positive with increased second quarter earnings driven by strong sales and an increase in market share. Notable numbers for S60 devices include sales of 2 million Eseries devices and 9 million Nseries devices in the second quarter. Individual device highlights includes sales of 1 million E65's and 1.5 million N95's in the same period.
Read on in the full article.
The report also says Nokia's market share is now 38%, which must surely be the highest it's ever been?
From a Symbian point of view, nice to see the huge growth in Nseries and Eseries devices, as we know they're all Symbian-based.
Looking at the Series 40 sales, all three of the top sellers mentioned (6300, 5200, 5300) run the latest version of Series 40, the one that looks and feels quite a lot like S60. This, and the apparent success of the 6120, could be bringing us closer to the day when all Nokia's non-budget phones run some version of S60, although there's a lot of barriers to go through before then (perhaps greatest of which is the lower battery life of smartphones).
Also interesting to note that Nokia's sales in the USA are diverging further and further from the rest of the world: sales went up by about 30 percent absolutely everywhere except the USA, where sales went down by 20 percent. This is going to lead to the US technology media covering Nokia (and, by extension, S60 and Symbian) less and less because they generally don't really bother covering the outside world. Even if Symbian continues to dominate the smartphone scene worldwide, as far as the US press is concerned they're only going to cover Windows Mobile, Palm and the iPhone.
Krisse, on the US: true. On the other hand, Nokia has taken some measures to market S60 more directly through flagsip stores, experience centers and new distribution channels (Dell etc.). With iPhone, there is more interest in the high end too. I've never seen N95 so many times before than when it was being compared to iPhone all over the place. And they did manage to finally get the N75 out with Cingular. Who knows, maybe some other S60s will make it too..
So, all hope is not lost. 😊
"On the other hand, Nokia has taken some measures to market S60 more directly through flagsip stores, experience centers and new distribution channels (Dell etc.). With iPhone, there is more interest in the high end too. I've never seen N95 so many times before than when it was being compared to iPhone all over the place. And they did manage to finally get the N75 out with Cingular. Who knows, maybe some other S60s will make it too.."
Yes, I agree, they're putting in much more effort than before, and the N95 has had a far higher profile in the USA than any previous S60 model. At last American commentators actually realise an S60 device is more than just a phone.
I suppose though it's too early to tell what the effects of all this are, as this report only covers the period from April to June. It may be that Nokia's US sales will increase in Q3 and Q4, as a result of the things you mention.
And, at the end of the day, the US mobile market isn't quite as important as it seems. Most phones in general are sold outside the US, and most of the growth in the mobile market is coming from Asia (esp. India and China) where Nokia is doing very well. The main reason why people concentrate so much on the USA is because its news media is unusually influential in what other news stations report. If a road bridge had collapsed in Nigeria or Brazil or Poland, would it really have been headline news on TV stations around the world? Would the OJ Simpson trial have been shown live around the world if he had been a German sportsman accused of murder in Germany?
It should also help that Nokia is reorganising itself so that a part of the company will concentrate entirely on sales and marketing in a unified way, rather than having marketing spread throughout the company. At the moment, Nokia Multimedia advertises Nseries phones, Nokia Enterprise advertises Eseries phones and Nokia Mobile Phones advertises numbered S60 phones, which is a bit odd as they're all basically selling the same product made by the same company.
Nokia has zero chance against the iPhone in the US. And the other markets will follow.
Krisse, true, but the US is still the biggest economy in the world and the largest single market with so many people with real purchasing power. And, whatever makes it here, tends to do fairly well elsewhere. Kallasvuo has made the point of continued importance of the US many a time, so I am hoping they will double their efforts here.
"Nokia has zero chance against the iPhone in the US. And the other markets will follow."
You told us that they had a million sales. In fact, here's what really happened:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/25/apple_iphone_results/
+++++Apple said Wednesday it sold 270,000 iPhones during the 30 remaining hours of its June quarter when the iPhone shipped, with 146,000 iPhones activated. Not only did this come in below some over ambitious Wall St expectations for between 500,000 and 700,000 units, but Apple didn't make a single cent from iPhone services.+++++
"Krisse, true, but the US is still the biggest economy in the world and the largest single market with so many people with real purchasing power. And, whatever makes it here, tends to do fairly well elsewhere."
The US is the biggest economy, but it's still only 25 percent of the overall world economy, and that percentage is shrinking all the time as China and India grow.
As far as phones go, I really don't think the US has any kind of trendsetting ability, in fact it's well behind Asia and Europe when it comes to phone technology. They're only just getting 3G networks now, for example, and many parts of America have no network coverage at all. US handsets also tend to be quite far behind Asian or European handsets, and usually have far more restrictions and crippled features. The E61 came out first in Europe with wifi, it came out later in America as the E62 without wifi: that's an example of the US operators actively keeping the US market behind the rest of the world, purely so they can make more money on network charges.
Even the iPhone is basically just a luxury interface-centric 2G device without even basic features such as MMS or the ability to change sim cards. It looks very good and is apparently very easy to use, but at that price point it will never be a mainstream phone.
America has to get out of this operator-centric rut it's in, and one thing that will do that is the recent decision to make sure the 700mhz auction will only go to companies that allow all compatible devices to access the network. Hopefully that will energise the sim-free market there, and encourage American wireless users to declare independence from their operators. That worked really well in Finland and other countries, it could work really well in America. The credit for the 700mhz auction terms has to go to Google, who seem to want to be genuinely open up competition instead of just relying on monopolies and restrictive contracts.
Krisse, I know they lag behind in mobile phone technology etc. But it still holds in general true that products that do well here, are likely to do fairly well globally. And the command 25% of world economy with only about 5% of its population. That still does tell you something about the market potential here. Again, I trust the CEO of Nokia to know what he is talking about. 😉