Streamlined Nokia Swings Back To Profit

Nokia has announced encouraging results as the company continues its resurgence following the sale of its handset business.

Boosted by large network rollouts in North America and China, the Finnish company reported a net profit of €747 million ($941 million) in its third quarter results, compared with a €91 million loss in the same quarter last year, up from the previous quarter and beating analyst expectations.

Revenue rose to €3.32 billion, easily beating market expectations, with Nokia’s total operating quarterly profit for the quarter coming in at €457m, a 32 percent rise from the previous quarter.

This led the company to update its outlook for the year, as it now expects an operating profit margin for the full year slightly above 11 percent, having previously expected the margin at high single digits.

Nokia shares rose 5.3 percent to €6.85 this morning following the news.

Resurgence

The results mean that Nokia’s stock is up 140 percent since it first agreed to sell its handset business to Microsoft back in September 2013, Reuters said.

Nokia, currently the third largest company in the global network equipment market after Ericsson and Huawei, says it currently connects one-quarter of the world’s population, including more than 120 million mobile and fixed subscribers in North America, where it works with eight of the top 10 service providers.

“Networks benefited from some unique developments in the quarter, with a business mix weighted towards Mobile Broadband and regional mix that included strong gains in North America,” Nokia chief executive Rajeev Suri said.

NSN was earmarked as a key growth area by Suri following his appointment as company CEO following the handset sale, alongside Nokia’s HERE mapping service and other advanced technology operations such as sensor systems and radio interoperability.

Nokia says that over the next decade, billions of devices will need to be connected and it believes it can help facilitate this.

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