Nokia sales keep on sliding

On Thursday, the company said it had net sales of €7.2bn (£5.85bn or $9.44bn) in the three months to the end of September, a year-on-year decline of 19 percent on €8.9bn in 2011. A fall in the number of handsets sold — primarily smartphones — accounts for much of the downturn."Nokia Group ended the quarter with gross cash of 8.8 billion euros -- $11.5 billion -- and net cash of 3.6 billion euros, or $4.7 billion.
CEO Stephen Elop said in a statement:

 "As we expected, Q3 was a difficult quarter in our Devices & Services business; however, we are pleased that we shifted Nokia Group to operating profitability on a non-IFRS basis. In Q3, we continued to manage through a tough transitional quarter for our smart devices business as we shared the exciting innovation ahead with our new line of Lumia products. In our mobile phones business, the positive consumer response to our new Asha full touch smartphones translated into strong sales. And in Q3, our mobile phones business delivered a solid quarter with sequential sales growth and improved contribution margin.
In Location & Commerce, we made progress establishing our platform offering with customers like Amazon. This is in line with our plan to expand our location offering to more customers. And, Nokia Siemens Networks had a remarkable quarter in which we achieved record profitability on a non-IFRS basis and the Nokia Siemens Networks cash balance increased for the fourth quarter in a row.
While we continue to focus on transitioning Nokia, we are determined to carefully manage our financial resources, improve our competitiveness, return our Devices & Services business to positive operating cash flow as quickly as possible, and ultimately provide more value to our shareholders."