“If we then use comScore’s figure for total smartphone users (110 million) then the data would suggest that there are 330k Lumias in use in the US. This would have been accumulated over a sales period of about four months.” Ouch. For a phone with such a huge marketing push, this is quite painful.
I read WP news on my Lumia and I got the impression the Lumia was doing pretty well in some markets.
And just when it seemed they could make it work they announce that the current Lumia’s won’t be getting WP8.
When a narrow escape presents itself during a dangerous situation it should be wise to take it without hesitation, but Nokia seems to think they can do even better.
Welcome to the world of marketing. Just open google and search for “lumia sales USA” and you see where that impression comes from.
The same about the claim Lumia sells well in China, even better then iphone.
The same with the 99% customer satisfaction.
You see the pattern? Spread false informations about the Lumia success, media pics up and later when proven it was all wrong nobody cares.
Just see how long media took and still takes to question Elop’s competence or asks why Nokia is dying. Just see that this news, that provide hard numbers for the Nokia Lumia fail and show how wrong Nokias Lumia sales informations are, made it only to the sidebar and not to the top news. Hey this news are about the market failure of a OS. Not just any OS but Windows Phone. This news are about the dead of WP7 and with it the last years mobile market leader Nokia within world record time. If this are not top news then I dont know what are.
Edited 2012-07-13 19:10 UTC
To be fair, though, this “hard data” ist still highly speculative. Don’t overtake yourself with negative information, because if it turns out differently, a lot of people will look stupid. The tragedy about this news item is, that nobody really thinks it’s made up because it’s impossible.
As a personal side note, let me add that I do think Nokia and WP deserve to die. But I think everybody needs to calm down and let happen what needs to happen.
Edited 2012-07-14 10:35 UTC
Highly speculative in that they may off by some percent? Heck, even if you double that number, or even if you tribble it, it stays a disaster.
But its even more worse. Both, Samsung and HTC, sold each more WP7 devices then Nokia! Heck, they did not only fail against ALL other ecosystems (including Windows CE, Bada and Symbian) but they even fail in the WP7 ecosystem! This is so much of a disaster that it explains why even Ballmer gets in distance to the burning Nokia platform.
Edited 2012-07-14 18:29 UTC
Just throwing out a number for a single manufacturer doesn’t help me understand the dynamics of the market place. If there are 330k luminas sold, and 5 million Androids, and 2 million iphones over the same time period, then that says something, otherwise its just not that useful.
Its something like 0.2% of all in the US sold mobiles during that quarter. Its like there where no Lumia sold in the US at all except there was a billion dollar thrown into marketing (far the most ever spend on marketing a phone), there where hundred of millions spend to accelerate sells like free xboxes with every Lumia, $100 AT&T discount making the phone free (read zero cents expensive) from day one. Now its on 1 cent on Amazon. This is while Lumia was claimed to be the most loved and sold phone on Amazon (another wrong PR trick as we see.now) and while Lumia had with AT&T a strong partner.
Also Nokia claimed Lumia sales are strong in the US and mixed everywhere else. If that is strong you may guess what that means for the world-wide Lumia sales.
Here we see the hard numbers, the facts how bad Lumia performed, how screwed Nokia is. One word: Elop.
Edited 2012-07-13 19:28 UTC
I do actually know someone with a lumina, here in the US. His strange company gave it to him for work. He doesn’t like it, but he doesn’t like any phones of any kind.
I am going to check Tomi Ahonen’s blog to further enjoy the news!
By the way Tomi’s articles tend to be a little bit longer than this article.
He’s also been shown to be consistently wrong, on nearly all his numbers.
Tomi Ahonen was able to more accurately predict Nokia’s marketshare than the whole gang in charge of Nokia (who keep on babbling about “sales below expectations”, “stronger competition than expected”, etc.).
No, actually, he hasn’t. I of course welcome you to show me otherwise.
He was a smart man before 2011, before Nokia made a decision he disagreed with. Now he’s a troll with an agenda, and his own past quotes are continuously viewed against him.
I guess I can see where he’d look legitimate to people who desperately want to believe what he’s saying is true.
Yes. Let’s take for example his prediction about Symbian sales:
His prediction on 2011-02-15 was that Nokia would be at 12% global smartphone marketshare at 2011Q4.[1]
That was very much spot on with the numbers that Gartner published one year later.[2]
In their Q4 earnings call, Nokia admitted that they “will sell fewer Symbian devices than [Nokia] previously anticipated.”
I don’t know about how smart he is or what kind of agenda he he has, but his predictions about Nokia marketshare were mostly in agreement with the measured numbers from Gartner, comScore and Nielsen.
[1] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/02/when-things-ge…
[2] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1924314
His analysis there, and largely prior to the MSFT agreement were mostly sound. His insight into how market share works for big players like Nokia is amazing. However, something happened to him. He is a shell of who he once was.
He posts blatant falsehoods and bans anyone who doesn’t sing him praises. He’s misled on Elop effect, he’s played up Nokia performance leading up to Feb 11, he misled on high return rates, on sales channel boycotts, on N9 sales numbers.
Basically all the red meat Lumia haters use is linked to him, and is wrong. That is the crux of my argument. Its quite tragic.
He is clearly overenthusiastic/overpessimistic on some claims, but his analysis of the very bad WP dynamics are sound.
Also, I don’t see how you can say that Lumia return rates are low, when Nokia pretends to have sold more than a million and Gartner says there are only 300k out there. What happened to the other 600k? Why is the Lumia sold for 1 penny on Amazon despite its amazing customer satisfaction?
Ahonen may be sometimes wrong, but you are delusional.
The numbers used to reach the 300k figure are unsound and intellectually dishonest. Read my other comments in this thread.
You can’t expect me to take you serious if I can’t expect you to read.
You are completely dishonest. You take Nokia’s number and pretend they represent “sold” Lumias, when it is certainly “shipped” (like every other manufacturer, because they have no direct visibility on retail operations). It also does not take into account returns.
You haven’t shown any figure to back your accusations. You just say “it can’t be right” and pretend Gartner has an agenda.
Well, there is still an easy lithmus test: if we follow you and consider Gartner is wrong on Lumia sales: they seem to be wrong not by 5% but by a factor of 3 or more (latest Nokia claims were more than 1 million Lumia in the US). They are dead wrong. Surely will Microsoft or Nokia step forth to denounce Gartner’s mistake? Hmmm?
The combination of both statistics is wrong, not any on by themselves. It doesn’t make sense.
There is an explanations. An ugly one. Tons of returns.
Either that, or comScore AND Nielsen are both wrong. Pick one.
Nielsen has come out and said that the 300k number is inaccurate.
But feel free to keep on spouting bullshit.
Concerning the Elop effect:
He was the first (or at least one of the first) commenters who mentioned the Osborne and Ratner Effect on Nokia sales. Now it seems generally accepted that the Osborne effect is what destroyed Symbian sales[1].
And he was not the only one to predict doom for Nokia[2] after the Microsoft deal.
Concerning Nokia performance:
I was unable to find any credible source who predicted Nokia sales collapse in such a short timeframe (2010Q4: 32 million, 2011Q4: 17 million) before the Microsoft deal was announced. Maybe you can show me one. That Nokia did well up to and including 2011Q1 is confirmed by Gartner and Kantar.
Concerning the WP7 sales boycott:
This has been independently verified by several publications who went into stores to ask for Windows Phone devices. The salespersons simply wouldn’t show them any, or only after insisting repeatedly.
Concerning the return rates:
He derives it from the reluctance of sales staff to sell Lumias. This connection might be unobvious to someone outside the business.
There is one other explanation for the reluctance besides high return rates: That the staff is not familiar or uncomfortable with WP7. But after the $25 million push to promote Lumia for AT&T staff, that explanation no longer appears plausible.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/06/monday-note-nokia-…
[2] http://semiaccurate.com/2011/03/14/microsoft-gutted-nokia-and-left-…
Well at least it’s better than Gartner’s “WP world domination” prediction.
Arguably just as bad
analysts must have a sweet job, just making shit up.
He was wrong by being too optimistic in his predictions. The WP8 and Nokia numbers are even worse. He was the most pessimistic of all analysts and yet the closest to the actual numbers. By definition, predictions tend to be at least slightly wrong.
He’s been dead wrong on his “N9 outsold Lumia numbers”, dead wrong on his analysis of the “Elop effect” and dead wrong about “High return rates” on Lumia devices.
He misleads, mischaracterizes, and bans anyone from his blog who proves otherwise.
He always supports his arguments with data (like actual numbers). Do you?
Anyway, this is kind of off-topic, so this is my last post on this subject.
His data is skewed. For example, he recently dissed Nokia for selling off Nokia Money which he claimed controlled 12% of the market and had 1.2 million subscribers.
Well, if you look at the actual data, Nokia only had 200k subscribers. A far cry from his original claim. Of course anyone who pointed this out was banned.
Or when he claimed Lumia in China was dead because China Mobile had 6% of then Chinese market, or 63M subscribers , when in reality it was 146M making them the largest CDMA provider in the world.
In fact, he also criticizes Nokia for NOT going with Verizon in the US despite Verizon has less subscribers (111 million)
Or writing a scathing blog post dissing Nokia for selling their mobile ad unit when in fact they just sold their media ad unit.
He is severely misleading.
> dead wrong on his analysis of the “Elop effect”
He’s pretty right on this one. It was the platform memo thing which marked the breakdown in Nokia. People started leaving, their stocks fell and etc. Elop is an exemplary management failure figure.
Actually, no. If you look at financial analysis from before the WP7 effect, independent analysis showed that Nokia was in a dive.
Nokia was already in full decline a quarter before the Burning Platform Memo.
If you chart their trajectory, you see no trajectorial change until Q2 2011, a full quarter after he claims the supposed effect made any difference.
Misleading.
Speaking of misleading, Nokia stocks dropped like a rock from 9 to 14 February 2011, the single sharpest decline throughout the last couple of years, and after a modest climb that hasn’t been seen since then.
So? Don’t tell me I have to explain the various factors that go into a stock value including perception and psychology? Right?
Stock value often lags behind the actual market, and its the point of investment.
LOL. Stock market value in this case preceded the actual market, immediately reacting to Elop’s memo.
Just stop talking.
The stock market is a volatile thing. It has dips and rallys, and using it as a gauge of sound Business isn’t fair.
Nokia is in transition, of course stock value will take a beating, but that’s a relatively short term metric.
I sincerely pity your business if you use stock price as a guiding principal in your decisions. You’d be changing direction every week.
Personally I think Nokia stock is supremely undervalued.
Nokia’s stock isn’t a “blip”…it’s not “in transition”. It is in FREEFALL! Take a look at a 5 year graph of their stocks. Note the point in time where Nokia agreed to switch exclusively to Windows Phone. Then note what happened after that. After this amount of time, it’s what they call a “trend”.
Hey, the only thing I’m saying is that you’re wrong. You say the stock market lags, I show you it precedes. Now you say it’s unfair to use it as an indicator, and I say you’re back-pedalling like some troll whose relation to facts is at best unstable.
Well, NYSE:NOK is about to close at 1.84 and seems to be getting quite comfortable in $<2 land. Which pegs it slightly bellow one quarter of it’s peak value in a year’s time.
I am at this point almost certain he’s prepping it for sale (likely in pieces). My guess would be: parts to MS (maps/satnav, what’s left of smartphones?, not sure where do patents go), parts to any taker, brand to someone like ZTE or even less known ambitious Chinese phone maker that could benefit from acquiring recognized brand (optionally brand stays and is used to operate formally Finish otherwise Chinese based phone maker).
It is hard to get at relative sales data for N9 vs. Lumia. Care to show us yours?
I found this one from Norway’s state company Telenor[1], which is based on sales from June 2012 and shows the N9 outselling all Lumias save for the Lumia 800. To put it context, this late in the game, when all N9 carrier marketing has ceased and before it was announced that Lumia wouldn’t get WP8.
So it seems not entirely implausible that the N9 has outsold Lumia in 2012Q1.
I noticed that some posts were deleted from people who tried to promote their own agenda/blogs, or made off-topic or trolling posts.
A lot of posts which respectfully disagree with him have remained however. So the “anyone” claim is not factually correct.
[1] http://www.online.no/teknologi/mobilene_som_selger_mest.jsp?cid=p-0…
This is precisely the point. There are no N9 figures. This does not mean you make them up yourself. Using Symbian YoY sales
sas if they were QoQ and making up the difference with supposed N9 sales is not just misleading, its absolutely wrong which suggests N9 sales are severely ginned up.
No way. The Lumia 800 is the flag ship in Norway, saying the 710 is getting outsold by the N9, even if true, isn’t saying much. Besides, its only one country in the entire world. It seems like quite a leap to say N9 outsold Lumias in Q1.
Anyone who proved him wrong with sourced data was called a troll and banned. He allows a limited discussion, just enough to maintain a veil of objectivity.
Uhm, I can’t quite decide whether you’re just an imbecile shill or a very persistent troll. Either you have some evidence that Ahonen’s numbers are wrong, which you claimed, or you don’t have any evidence that he’s been misleading. At any rate, you’re a very dishonest person and should be ashamed of yourself.
first,
They’re not his numbers. They’re from a Symbian fan site.
Second,
Its very easy to disprove the numbers. They use Year over Year sales as if they were Quarter over Quarter, then figure that the difference in units must be N9 sales.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/14122_Nokia_Q4_2011-in_the…
In the comments on the forum thread is where the error is noticed.
Do you read what you write? Or at least understand it? Here:
>> outsold Lumia in 2012Q1
and you try to spin a Lumia800 vs Lumia710 story and argue with Finnland? Hallelujah. I would delete your posts too if you spam my blog, annoy my readers and make yourself a fool with such a argumentation-culture.
No one fucking understands you half the time.
Look, you accused him of giving wrong claims on N9 vs. Lumia sales. I showed that his claims are consistent with the little data that is publicly available. That the data allows other conclusions too doesn’t make him wrong.
Saying he is wrong requires you to give the data to show that he is wrong. Or else it is your opinion vs. his opinion.
“quite a leap” doesn’t mean wrong. The only other Lumia phone that came close to the Top 10 was the Lumia 900. And this is at the end of Q2, mind you.
I have followed the discussions on his for some time (including the claims of censorship in his blog comments) and I looked in my browser cache for deleted comments. None of those I found contributed to the discussion in a constructive way. Instead, they were hostile, insulting, promoting their own websites, repeating falsehoods that had already been debunked, or attacking him on things he wrote in other blog posts.
I didn’t find a single deleted comment that would qualify as disagreeing respectfully, with credible sources and relevant to the blog post to which the comment was made.
Have fun with the virus! Google informs me that visiting his blog will infect me.
Why was this modded down? Google did inform me that the site was hosting malware.
I didnt think it had to be said how dangerous it is to mix to independent sets of data. Apparently it does.
Ahem… Actually that is how science works. You know, they compare two or more independent sets of data to prove something.
330k appears a little on the low side. Microsoft/Nokia spent on the order of $25 million to push the Lumia 900 to AT&T staff[1]. Given $217 manufacturing cost according to iSuppli[2], that would mean 115k phones for AT&T staff alone.
[1] http://www.wpcentral.com/report-nokia-paying-att-exclusive-employee…
[2] http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/pages/Nokia-900-Carries-Bill-…
Using Nokia’s Q1 numbers, they sold a total of 290k Lumia’s on T-Mobile.
So what this article is saying is that Nokia sold zero Lumia 900s? Because, as you’ve shown, that would be impossible if they seeded anywhere near the amount you claim.
Something is obviously wrong here, and its what happens when you try to present numbers with an agenda.
No, this happens when Nokia and Microsoft refuse to show the world the real numbers. Could it be because they are embarrassed?
So do you admit that the numbers in this article are impossibly wrong? Just to get a feel for your objectivity.
I have no idea how you came up with that conclusion. Do we participate in the same topic thread? Are we in parallel universes?
And to answer your question: yes, I think they are pretty much accurate and their author is quite right in his arguments.
So do you think Nokia sold zero Lumia 900s on ATT?
Nokia’s own Q1 numbers show they sold 300k Lumia 710s alone during the same time frame they allegedly sold a total of 300k Lumia’s TOTAL.
Maybe worldwide vs. US-only?
Nope. It uses the Lumia 710s Average Selling Price and Nokia Q1 results, specifically regional earnings out of the US.
Edit: HEY even Tomi agrees http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/04/who-wants-numb…
Thom, I think its time to mark this article as misleading. It takes data from two independent sources and mashes them into some Frankenstein analysis. The two sources by the way, having reporting cutoffs of a month apart (May vs June)
It also, as I’ve shown, uses impossible numbers.
Edited 2012-07-13 17:54 UTC
I think its well past the time to mark you as misleading. You spent a large part of the comments saying how one persons numbers cant be trusted, yet then use them to agree with yourself^aEUR| you could at least be consistent. I encourage you to back up any comments above with more than ^aEUR~everyone knows^aEURTM
We get it, you have a thing for WP.
Conversely, do YOU agree with what he said with regards to Lumia 710 sales?
Forget about me, if you take him at his word about 290k Lumia 710s sold I the USA then this 300k Lumia 900 number can’t possibly be true.
So do you believe him, or is he misleading?
We think you are misleaded. This
> uses the Lumia 710s Average Selling Price and Nokia Q1 results, specifically regional earnings out of the US.
is where you got it wrong. Please read the news again, follow the link,and read that too.
Actually, no, I didn’t misread. Thanks anyway.
These are totally different numbers. Let’s have an overview of all the numbers again:
1. Asymco claims that 330k Lumias are in use in the US.
2. Nokia claims to have sold 290k Lumias to T-Mobile.
I already said that I think Asymco’s estimate might be a bit on the low side. However even so it is possible to reconcile the two numbers with entirely plausible explanations.
Channel stuffing is likely the one that contributes most. Nokia has pulled off such tricks in the past to artificially inflate sales numbers. Problem is that it would come back to haunt Nokia, and result in a sales collapse in Q3, and rapidly sinking prices. We’ll see.
Second one is that AT&T staff is apparently not convinced of Lumia so didn’t sell many of them. Over at Asymco they speculate about 1 Lumia per day per AT&T store, a sad number indeed for a flagship phone.
Third possible explanation is that people bought Lumias and found them to be lacking[1], so went back to their old phones. So Nokia could claim a sale, but comScore wouldn’t register it as the phone was not in use. There would be an obvious discrepancy to the very positive Amazon reviews, so this explanation might require the additional assumption that those are at least in part astroturf (not implausible either given that Microsoft is known for covert guerilla marketing and the reports about the “Nokia Army”)
[1] http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=44034
Nielsen has come out and said the 300k number, and this entire article is wrong.
Nokia was never very open with model sales numbers…
The $25 million figure is undisputed. Maybe the iSuppli numbers are wrong, but likely not by much. Or many AT&T staff refused the offer to get a Lumia for free, which seems somewhat plausible given [1]. I expect that there has been some channel stuffing going on, too. Which would be outside comScore’s users number but inside Nokia’s sales number.
[1] http://www.intomobile.com/2012/04/12/att-reps-push-iphone-prospecti…
That has nothing at all to do with what I said. Re read my post.
I assessed the plausibility of my claims, something which you put into doubt.
Also I looked at how to reconcile your “290k Lumia’s” sales to T-Mobile with the 330k total number from Asymco.
Edited 2012-07-13 18:41 UTC
I dont think channel stuffing is plausible, carriers won’t continue orders if they’re not selling through inventory. T-Mobile has also said they’re very pleased with 710 sales, and it was a best seller on TMobile for many months.
A very plausible explanation.
I didn’t check into the numbers but I wouldn’t be surprised if one side was reporting what was shipped and the other what customers are actually buying.
It’s very possible that Nokia shipped 500k devices and equally possible during that same time prior for only 100k devices to be purchased, leaving 400k in stock, unpurchased.
Now why do I point that out? Because that is exactly the difference between PC sales and Microsoft’s sales claims. Microsoft doesn’t report licenses purchased, just how many they’ve sold to vendors. One looks a lot better than the other. Which one tracks reality depends on how you look at the market, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same kind of game played with WinPhone.
And yes, I expect Microsoft will announce Win8 will be the best selling version of Windows yet…for the same reason Vista and Win7 were.
So Nokia is going bankrupt in the Fall?
No, they are not going bankrupted. There are to much things inside Nokia that are still of high value (brand, patents eg). They will get split. Interesting parts sold, remainigs finished. Nokia, as brand, will continue to exist. Its just not the same Nokia inside it was before. But that is already today the case.
In 2012Q4? I think more likely in 2013Q1, Q2 in the best case. But then we are maybe not at the end of the bad Nokia news series yet and it will happen much earlier.
Edited 2012-07-14 18:56 UTC
Nokia/WP thing is dead. Long live Jolla Mobile.
Count me among those anticipating the first Jolla release, but after owning and loving the 770, 800 and 900, I’m sad my next phone won’t sport the Nokia logo. So much rich history lost to incompetent leadership.