Helsinki - Second-quarter earnings at Nokia had more than doubled to €2.8 billion (R27.3 billion) on strong sales, the world's largest cellphone maker said yesterday, adding that it had further increased its market share. Its shares rose 7 percent.
Net profit for the quarter to June came to €2.82 billion, up from €1.14 billion in the second quarter last year, the Finnish company said. Sales rose 28 percent to €12.6 billion from the year-ago period.
The company said it had increased its global market share to 38 percent from 34 percent in the same quarter in 2006 and from 36 percent in the first quarter. It sold 100 million cellphone devices in the period, an increase of 29 percent on 2006.
Nokia's result beat expectations, with its shares surging 7 percent in Helsinki to €22.05. Before the earnings announcement, the company's stock had been up about 2 percent in anticipation of a good second-quarter performance.
Chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said: "Nokia's share of the global device market improved to an estimated 38 percent while operating margins in our device businesses were at their highest level in three years."
The company said it expected the overall global handset market to grow "by 10 percent or more" on its 2006 estimate of 978 million units, up from its previous forecast of "up to 10 percent more". It expected its own market share to increase from the second quarter, but gave no estimate.
"Nokia took us all by surprise. We expected a strong result, but not this strong," said Jussi Hyoty, chief analyst at FIM Securities. "Nokia is back to doing everything well, as it used to."
The company said particularly its high-end models - the Nokia 6300, N95 and E65 - had shown an "excellent performance", beating expectations.
"Nokia now has some major hit products across what is already the industry's broadest product portfolio," Kallasvuo said. "I am particularly encouraged by the success of a number of recently launched higher-end devices, which made a strong contribution to increased profitability."
But the group again cautioned about the performance of its troubled network operations, describing market conditions as challenging because of heavy competition.
Nokia Siemens Networks, which started operations in April, showed a net loss of €1.1 billion. Nokia said the result was not directly comparable to the performances of the network operations of Nokia and the German giant, Siemens, in the same quarter in 2006. - Sapa-AP