Nokia press released its financial results for Q1 2008 this morning and as expected, all is good for the Finnish giant. Almost, at least. As you can see from Nokia’s chart above, Nokia advanced significantly in every category with the exception of those relating to profit. It is important to understand however, that profit figures are skewed by several factors covered in detail in the release (hit the read link). To highlight two major ones, Nokia had to shell out €217 million due to Finnish pension liabilities and another €81 million as a result of the Bochum site closure. With regards to both core and ancillary business earnings however, profits were up significantly between Q1 2007 and Q1 2008. OPK’s note:

"Nokia had strong profitability in the first quarter, with both operating profit and EPS up significantly year on year. The overall device market developed as expected, with the greatest demand in emerging markets, where our position is very strong. The competitiveness of our product portfolio is reflected in our market share and we target market share gains in the second quarter. The portfolio is renewed on a continuous basis. While we will not have major new products shipping in the second quarter, we expect a number of new products to be shipping, and to have a positive impact on our results, in the second half of 2008."

All things considered, Nokia’s net sales were up 28% (35% at constant currency) to a cool €12.7 billion and operating margin was up 0.8%. Global market share did slip from Q4 2007 to Q1 2008 however, dropping 1% to 39%. A total of 115.5 million devices were shipped in Q1 of this year and 14.6 million of them were S60 smartphones. Quite interestingly, the biggest sales region for Nokia was Asia Pacific where 34.1 million handsets were sold, up 40% from Q1 2007! On the flip side of the coin, sales in the US continue to falter, dropping to 2.6 million handsets sold (almost a 50% decline from Q1 2007).

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