Nokia: bad news without end

Like other CEOs of struggling companies, Stephen Elop has an unenviable job. He took over Nokia in 2010 when his predecessor had been unable to arrest the company’s decline.

Still, let’s not put too fine a point on it: Elop’s gamble to bet the company’s future on switching to the Windows Phone platform has been an absolute disaster.

In quarterly earnings announced Friday, the company lost €4 billion for the first 9 months of 2012 — nearly a billion of that in the 3rd quarter — versus €0.4 billion lost in the same period of 2011. This is not a one-time blip: here months ago, Nokia also lost money and announced massive layoffs.

Smartphone sales have been falling since 2010, but the major collapse came this year as the company phased out its Symbian handsets. AllAboutWindowsPhone.com (née AllAboutSymbian.com) published the damning chart:

Nokia has been more successful at killing Symbian — by starving new releases — than getting people to buy Windows Phones. In fact, as late as Q2, Nokia was still selling more Symbian than Windows phones.

The only uptick in smartphone sales in Q3 came because during Q3, the company has rebranded its S40 (now “Asha Touch”) as a “smartphone” platform. Whether or not the new classification is accurate, it doesn’t reduce in increased sales and highlights how far the company has fallen since its 2010 peak.

It seems like the assumptions behind the Windows bet were flawed. Nokia (or at least Elop) hoped that being the big fish in the Windows pond would be better than slugging it out in the Android market.

Yes, Nokia (at least for now) has the majority of WP sales, but that's not much. The assumption was that Windows Phone would be competitive with Android and iOS, but so far it isn’t. Q3 numbers won’t be out until next month, but in Q2 WP was #5 at 3.5%, after Android, iOS, BlackBerrry and Symbian. Meanwhile, the transition has been managed in such a way to kill its Symbian cash cow before the customers embraced its new products.

For years, Nokia was the world leader in both smartphones and handsets. Now Samsung is selling almost 3x as many Android smartphones as Nokia is selling for WP, Symbian and S40. If Nokia isn’t ready to compete with Samsung, maybe it should just close the handset business and focus on infrastructure.

More realistic is the advice from former Apple Europe president Jean-Louse Gasée: fire Elop and switch to Android. If Nokia’s board believed in accountability, they’d lower the axe after the end of the Christmas quarter, but more likely they’re going to limp along until they can no longer deny the reality of Elop’s failed platform strategy.