Nokia having a stormer in Q4, earn piles of cash

Last year was certainly not too kind to Nokia as its sales kept shrinking for the first three quarter, but oh my do we have a surprise for you here. Apparently the Nokia phones have been flying off the shelves during the holiday season and the company has ended the year with a net profit of good 882 million euro. Not bad for a year, plagued by a global financial and economy crisis, is it?

The world's largest manufacturer has managed to ship 126.9 million devices in Q4 2009, which is 12% better than Q4 of 2008 and 17% better than Q3 of 2009. Those have generated a revenue of nearly 12 billion euro (which is a 5.3% decrease Year-on-Year and 22.2% increase Quarter-on-Quarter).

The company estimates its market share to 39%, which is better than both the 37% in Q4 2008 and the 38% in Q3 2009. Based on the full year sales though the Nokia estimates its market share to 38%, which is a 1% decrease compared to the whole previous year.

Admittedly the profit of the company would have been much higher if the Nokia-Siemens Networks division wasn't doing so badly - it ended the year with more than 1.6 billion euro operating loss. One would think that with so many HSPA network updates carried around the world and LTE kicking in the infrastructure companies will be doing much better but apparently something is terribly wrong with this Nokia division.

For more information about the Nokia Q4 financial report please follow the link.

Meanwhile, Nokia announced the availability of the new Ovi Maps version for the Nokia N97. Coming with free voice-guided navigation this is one of the most major application updates that Nokia (or any other company for that matter) have released recently.

If you happen to be a Nokia N97 owner, you head over to the Ovi Maps official website and get your update right now.