Nokia shifts further away from Symbian as company reports big profits, job cuts

The world’s top mobile phone maker Nokia on Thursday said it would cut 1 800 jobs after announcing stellar third-quarter results one month into the mandate of a new chief executive.

Also announcing a major strategy shift, Nokia said it would now focus on developing applications on the Qt framework, which essentially removes the somewhat conflicting two-headed approach of developing for both Symbian and MeeGo.

“Historically, the company had said, here’s Symbian 3, and there will be another big thing called Symbian 4 in the future, which represented a binary break… this is not a recommended strategy,” Elop said.

The shift to Qt will allow developers both in Nokia and at large to create applications for both Symbian and MeeGo platforms, without having to code two entirely different sets of software.

This essentially abandons the idea of further incarnations of Symbian, which has been seen as an outdated technology, unable to keep up with faster and easier-to-use operating systems of Nokia’s top competitors.

Nokia’s return to profit, posting an unexpected 529 million euros, far outstripped expectations.

“All in all, our devices and services divisions delivered,” new president and chief executive Stephen Elop told reporters in a global phone conference, although he noted there was still a great deal of ground to cover.

“According to our preliminary estimate, we lost market share. We were not able to keep up with demand on the markets, especially towards the lower end of our product offering,” he said.

Elop, who is the first non-Finn to captain Nokia, took over in September from a beleaguered Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, who had been blamed this year for Nokia’s failure to shine in the smartphone market.

Elop’s background as a Microsoft executive hinted that Nokia would shift focus more strongly to software development, an area where the company was seen to lag behind.

“The biggest surprise was the profit margin for the mobile phones unit, which was better than expected, and which pulled results for the entire company above expectations,” Nordea’s senior analyst Martti Larjo told the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat.

Nokia shares jumped 7.25 percent to 8.28 euros shortly before closing on the Helsinki stock exchange, which was up 2.76 percent, as investors reacted to the company’s marked improvement over the 559 million-euro loss it posted for the third quarter in 2009.

Net sales of 10.27 billion euros were meanwhile in line with industry expectations for the quarter.

But the good news was tempered by the quick release of another statement, where the company justified 1 800 planned job cuts.

“A number of job cuts are related to streamlining particularly around the Symbian platform,” Elop explained.

Up to 850 of the planned cuts will hit Finland, and Nokia shop steward Sami Sallmen said this means around 600 jobs could be lost in Finland’s Symbian unit.

“We’ve already had layoffs in the past couple of years,” Sallmen said, adding that Thursday’s announcement came as a complete surprise.

Following the last large round of layoffs in the first half of 2009, “We lost a lot of people,” he said, lamenting that “now we face the same thing again.”

And despite the company’s good showing, Nokia’s third-quarter results are in many respects merely a place-holder in the company’s tumultuous year, as it waits for both Elop’s appointment and its new N8 smartphone to truly make their impact felt.

Nokia continued to take a beating in market share at the hands of Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry and phones running Google’s Android platform.

Third quarter market share dropped to 30 percent compared to 34 percent for the same period last year and 33 percent in the second quarter of 2010.

And the company, which had previously expected its market share this year to remain flat from the 38 percent reported in 2009, now expects its market share to slip from last year’s figures. – AFP