Apple has surged past Nokia in global smartphone sales as the ailing handset maker reported a steep net loss for the second quarter.
Nokia said it sold 16.7 million smartphones in the second quarter of the year, falling well short of Apple’s 20.3m iPhones.
Quarterly phone sales were down 20% from a year ago, missing analysts’ forecasts, at a time when the overall global market grew by 10%.
A Reuters calculation showed that Nokia’s overall market share fell to 23.7% from 29.1% in the previous quarter – a far cry from the near 40% share Nokia previously enjoyed.
Nokia is now pinning its turnaround hopes on a new suite of devices using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, but these will not come to market until later this year, or early in 2012.
“The path to recovery for Nokia is going to be a long one. Deterioration in Nokia’s smartphone performance shows that time is of the essence in rebuilding a coherent portfolio of Windows Phone 7 products in 2012,” said CCS analyst Geoff Blaber.
The company did at least offer a glimmer of hope for investors by saying it expected to be profitable in Q3 this year, despite a quarterly net loss of €492 million.
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