Nokia’s Q4 2007 Results Are In, U.S. Market Sucks
Nokia today released their Q4 2007 sales, along with the full year for 2007, and they’re pretty freakin good (as usual). Stefan @ IntoMobile beat me to the punch of pulling out interesting tidbits, but I wanted to point out the more interesting ones.
North American sales plummeted 23.3%, even while the total sales were boosted by 25.8%. More importantly, even dropping that much in the U.S., Nokia managed to increase its market share to finally reach the 40% mark. What’s that tell us? Nokia doesn’t need the U.S. market to dominate. It’s an unfortunate fact, but fact it remains.
Average selling price in Q4 2007 was 83EUR (US$121). Nokia’s selling more low-end handsets than high-end. Nseries sales increased 48%, Eseries increased a whopping 102% over Q4 2006. Over 11 million Nseries devices were sold in Q4. That’s 122,222 Nseries per day, every day.
133.5 million Nokia handsets were sold in Q4 2007. That’s nearly 1.5 million handsets PER DAY.
You can dig through all of the numbers for yourself in the Press Release here. My personal takeaway is that Nokia is kicking butt in nearly every market other than the U.S., but they still managed to increase sales, profits, and market share globally. Supposedly Nokia has 6-12 handsets coming out in partnership with the carriers here in the U.S. in 2008. Hopefully this will be enough to garner more marketshare locally.
The conference call is going on in a few minutes, and the Q&A on these things usually yields some pretty interesting tidbits. I’ll update this post with anything I can glean from there.
Great read, obviously if Nokia wants to increase market share here, they will have to work (unfortunately) with carriers. I assume the reason for the jump in the E-Series sales was due to the E62 offered by a few carriers. You could argue the N75, but it was (and still is) horribly marketed and an under-achiever IMO when it comes to N-series devices.
It will be interesting to see what Nokia does to solidify the U.S. market, I think they are taking baby steps in the right direction, but I feel without more carrier releationships in the equation, it will be an uphill battle
One factor contributing to dismal US market share may be the lousy way Nokia has treated it’s current US customers. The phones released through carriers are lackluster at best, and the others have numerous quirks in terms of features and support.
Point in fact: they released the N95 here with no US 3G support, then brought a North American 3G unit to market less than 5 months later. Had they not gone to great lengths to deny the future of a North American 3G at the start, it wouldn’t sting so much. At least Apple ponied up a $100 rebate after they screwed their customers.
To add insult to injury, the v12 firmware update provided little benefit, and a host of software glitches. Worst, they gutted the ability to use online music services such as Rhapsody and Yahoo Music.
To fix SOME of the aforementioned software glitches, and to provide access to the very long-awaited Nokia Music service, they eventually released the v20 firmware update!
But, of course, North America doesn’t get it! We paid our $750 and have been left for many months without online mp3 downloads, and numerous, numerous software glitches. Where is the love Nokia?
No love from you, no more money from US.