Nokia turns over a new leaf as network business leads to profit
Finnish technology and networking giant Nokia yesterday reported a strong third quarter, announcing a 13 per cent year-on-year growth in sales for Nokia Networks due to new deployments in North America and China.
Overall, sales also rose to €3.3bn (£2.6bn) and the business returned to a profit of €750m, from a loss of €105m during the same period last year. The results prompted a 3.53 per cent rise in Nokia’s shares which closed up at €6.74 in Helsinki.
Nokia Networks – one of the firm’s three remaining divisions after it sold its mobile devices unit to Microsoft in early September 2013 – generated some €397m in profit, the majority of Nokia’s total profits. “Performance at Nokia Networks was particularly satisfying, with both growth and improved profitability. Progress was widespread, with four of our six regions increasing sales,” said chief executive Rajeev Suri.
Another strong contributor for Nokia was its mapping and location intelligence business, Here, which sold map data licenses for the embedded navigation systems of 3.2m new vehicles.
This increased from 2.6m vehicles in the same quarter last year.