Skip to footer

For Nokia, Lumia sales are a bright spot in an otherwise bumpy quarter

The Lumia line is selling well in Europe and Asia. But Nokia sales in the US have been anemic. 

|
Reuters
US customers will be able to purchase a Nokia Lumia 1020 smart phone, shown here, beginning on July 26.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Nokia shipped 7.4 million Nokia Lumia smart phones in the second quarter of 2013, a record for the Finnish company. 

The strong fiscal Q2 2013 figures for the Lumia line follow a big first quarter in which the company unloaded 5.6 million Lumias. But the larger picture was far less bright for Nokia: a 24 percent decline in overall sales from the same time last year, and a 27 percent sales dip for devices in its "mobile phones" vertical (a term that covers non-smart phone handsets). 

Moreover, as Preston Gralla of Computerworld notes, Nokia's performance in the US and Canada has been less than stellar. 

"The worst news may be the lagging North American performance of Lumia Windows Phone devices, with sales of only 500,000," Mr. Gralla writes. "That's a jump over the previous quarter of 400,000. But that increase is misleading, because in the fourth quarter of 2012 North American sales were up to 700,000. Way back on the fourth quarter of 2011, Lumia sales were at 500,000. Since then, sales have essentially been static, ranging from 300,000 per quarter to 700,000 per quarter." 

In the US, in fact, the smart phone market is dominated by Apple and handsets running Google's Android mobile OS. According to a recent report from comScore, as of May, 38.9 percent of American smart phone users were using an Apple iPhone. Samsung placed second, with 21.3 percent of the market, and HTC placed a distant third, with a 9.3 percent stake. Nokia wasn't even on the list. 

So yes, Nokia had a good quarter. But there's a lot of ground to be made up if the company really wants to compete in North America. 

In related news, Nokia recently unveiled the Windows Phone 8-powered Lumia 1020, which packs a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, a 4.5-inch AMOLED display and a PureView 41-megapixel camera, which Nokia says is capable of taking snaps with resolutions as high as 7712 x 5360. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to For Nokia, Lumia sales are a bright spot in an otherwise bumpy quarter
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0719/For-Nokia-Lumia-sales-are-a-bright-spot-in-an-otherwise-bumpy-quarter
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe