Nokia is currently trying to transition from a being a company which is strong with feature-phones to a company which can also make it big in the smartphone market. But this transition may cost Nokia a bit dearly. Nokia finally declared it’s performance in the last quarter of 2011 and the stats aren’t very great. According to the company, the net sales of it’s smart devices was down by 31 percent compared to a year ago. And this has resulted in about a loss of $1.2 billion in operating costs.

Nokia sold about 19.6 million smartphones in Q4, 2011, out of which only about 1 million were Lumia devices. This shows that the strong point of the company continues to Symbian devices which, in fact, is a great weakness for Nokia. Sooner or later, Nokia has to shed that load and move sincerely to the smartphone side of the fence. But as long as Nokia tries to rely on Symbian, it may have to continue dwelling in losses.

The mobile division, per se, did well. It was the Location & Commerce group that cost Nokia dearly during Q4. What has turned into a crucial question for Nokia is that can it successfully pitch in Nokia Lumia 710 and 800 and make something out of them in the first quarter of 2012. More importantly, can Nokia make a significant presence known in the smartphone world with it’s Nokia Lumia 900 which is currently hailed as the best Windows Phone.

As per geographical distributions, Nokia did well in Europe, although it was a huge percent less than what Nokia got out of Europe in Q4 2010. The sharpest decline in the overall revenue was from North America, a region where Nokia is increasingly alienated by Android and iOS smartphones. However, Nokia did fairly good in developing markets and it seems  that Nokia’s reliance on Symbian devices is an outcome of the fact that Nokia still has a strong presence in developing nations.

Image courtesy Micky.