Nokia Q2 financial report is out, shows improvement over Q1

Nokia have just announced their Q2 financial report. The numbers are showing sings of recovering from the shock of the recession - their operating profit went up by almost 51% and their estimated market share increased a percent to 38%. The total number of phones they shipped was just over 103.2 million, a healthy improvement over the 93.2 million the previous quarter.

Reading through the report shows that things are improving since the begging of the year but they are still not as good as they used to be. Net sales for the quarter rose 7% from last quarter's 9.28 billion, but are 24.6% lower than those for the same period last year. Operating profit has also shrunk by 71% from the same quarter the previous year, but compared to Q1's 90% it's not as abysmal.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic continues to steam ahead with 3.7 million units sold for the quarter (adding up to 6.8 million total sales since last November) - more than a million handsets monthly. N-series and E-series phones also sold a million units morethan in Q1.

Geographically, sales for the quarter went up by about a third in the Middle East and Africa, as well as Latin America compared to Q1. The other regions saw a more moderate increase of between 4 and 7 percent, the only exception being North America, where Nokia sales were down by 5.9% .

The Average Selling Price went down to 62 euro from the 65 euro from the previous quarter, which Nokia explain with increased production of lower-end phones. In an attempt to counteract this, they've began shipping their flagship smartphone the Nokia N97, their flagship imaging phone - the N86 8MP, and finally, their flagship email-oriented phone - the E75. In other words - Nokia is gearing up retake some turf at the high end, too.

They also mentioned in passing collaboration with Intel for a device based on "Intel architecture", which they say will combine computing performance and high-bandwidth mobile communication resulting in a "PC-like Internet experiences across a new class of services". We just hope there won't be a new term for the device - netbook, MIP, UMPC - it's confusing enough. At any rate, Intel and Nokia both have strong commitments to Linux (Moblin and Maemo) so a Linux tablet is a good guess at what might come out of this partnership.

For more numbers, check out the whole report here.