Nokia has had a hard road transitioning from Symbian to Windows Phone, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any easier any time soon. The Finnish company posted their Q3 results this week, with a reported $754 million quarterly loss just less than a year after the firm introduced their first Lumia Windows Phone handsets.
We had known ahead of time that the quarter likely wouldn’t be a good one for Nokia, as they have released few new phone recently even though they have reportedly been doing well in their expansion to China, where Windows Phone is relatively more popular than it is in other parts of the world.
Nokia now has $4.7 billion in the bank, compared to $6.64 billion at the same time last year. Nokia will surely be looking forward to the release of Windows Phone 8 and its Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 smartphones, which will be among the first to launch with the new mobile OS.
Nokia is facing increasing pressure in the Windows Phone marketplace, as the hardware restrictions on the OS have relaxed and companies can more easily use their expertise with Android hardware to produce both good looking and powerful Windows Phone 8 handsets.
Samsung and its Ativ S smartphone is expected to be a big competitor due to Samsung’s massive name in the marketplace and large advertising budget, but HTC and Huawei are also fielding Windows Phone 8 devices and will also be looking to take some of the pie. None of these are exlusively Windows Phone as Nokia is, however, so for them it is much less consequential.
It’s definitely the case for the Nokia 820 and 920 that if they aren’t well received by the public, it could be a very difficult quarter indeed coming up. Nokia is predicting a gloomy but not apocalyptic fourth quarter, so stay tuned to see how well they do.