We're big fans of Nokia's Lumia 900 and Windows Phone 7 in general, which is why it's rather sad to hear the company's quarterly financials looking worse than ever, with an operating loss of a billion dollars and little traction in the U.S.
Nokia announced its second-quarter 2012 financials on Thursday morning (PDF link), and there's little in the way of good news for Finland's onetime smartphone champ. The company reported an operating loss of 826 million Euros ($1 billion USD) during the three month period after failing to gain much traction in the crucial North American market.
Internationally, the company's Windows Phone-powered Lumia line racked up some decent gains, shipping four million handsets during the quarter. The problem is, only 600,000 of those went to North American customers, where Nokia has struggled to find customers against the one-two punch of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android.
"Nokia is taking action to manage through this transition period," CEO Stephen Elop said. "While Q2 was a difficult quarter, Nokia employees are demonstrating their determination to strengthen our competitiveness, improve our operating model and carefully manage our financial resources."
On a more uplifting note, Nokia has sold seven million Lumia handsets to date (including the four million from Q2) -- but that's little consolation for the company's 60 percent drop in North American sales, where the company moved 1.5 million handsets during the same quarter in 2011.
Word that Microsoft has no upgrade path for existing Windows Phone 7 handsets to move to Windows Phone 8 later this year is likely going to make the situation even worse next quarter, unless the Nokia faithful are ready to pony up more cash to buy the next generation handset when it becomes available.
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