Now that Apple and Samsung have won the smartphone wars, old king Nokia must be feeling pretty miserable. The results don’t look good and there are constant rumours of the company being bought over by Samsung.
Nokia revealed its second quarter results which showed that losses by the Finnish company have nearly quadrupled in the second quarter thanks to the falling sales of smartphones. Nokia posted a net loss of €1.41 billion ($1.72 billion), compared with a loss of a €368 million in the same period last year.
Overall sales were down 19 percent to €7.54 billion, not as low as analysts’ forecast of €7.36 billion, according to financial data provider FactSet. Smartphone sales were weak, however, dropping 34 percent to €1.54 billion.
According to the report
Frank Nuovo, the former chief designer at Nokia Corp., gave presentations more than a decade ago to wireless carriers and investors that divined the future of the mobile Internet.
More than seven years before Apple Inc. rolled out the iPhone, the Nokia team showed a phone with a color touch screen set above a single button. The device was shown locating a restaurant, playing a racing game and ordering lipstick. In the late 1990s, Nokia secretly developed another alluring product: a tablet computer with a wireless connection and touch screen—all features of the hot-selling Apple iPad.
“I was heartbroken when Apple got the jump on this concept,” says Mr. Nuovo, Nokia’s former chief designer. “When people say the iPhone as a concept, a piece of hardware, is unique, that upsets me.”
The report also says that iPhone was tested by Nokia’s tear down engineers and because it did not withstand Nokia’s rigorous “drop test,” in which a phone is dropped five feet onto concrete from a variety of angles, it was decided that Apple’s device was a failure.
The Nokia Lumia 800. AP
And they couldn’t have been more wrong about that. The iPhone unleashed the smartphone war in a way that has changed the mobile industry forever.
The iPhone which celebrates its fifth year of existence, has been referred to as the most disruptive device in history on BusinessInsider.
The Wall Street Journal also mentions how Nokia spent a whole lot of money, amounting to nearly $6 billion on a a pile of patents which is also now the bulk of the value of the entire company. Patents which didn’t help the company come up with any great products.
Nokia recently slashed the price of its flagship smartphone the Lumia 900 by 50 percent in the hope of revival sales.
With inputs from AP
