Nokia has announced its Q4 2011 financial results, which are showing signs of improvement compared to the previous quarter, as well as the company’s dreary Q2 2011 interim report, but are down on most counts compared to the same period for last year.

The Finnish phone giant managed to amass net sales amounting to more than $10 billion during the quarter, which is up 11% over the previous quarter but down 21% compared to the same period of the previous year.

Nokia sold 19.6 million smartphones, a far cry from the record amount (37.04 million) of iPhone sales Apple delivered in its most recent (Q1 2012) quarter. For Nokia this represents a quarterly increase of 17%, but a year-on-year decrease of 31% when compared to the 28.6 million mobile devices Nokia sold during the same period last year.

Out of the 19.6 million total for smartphone sales, Espoo said that it had sold more than a million Windows Phone Mango-powered Lumia smartphones, which the company also recently launched in South Africa. In terms of feature phones, the Espoo-based firm sold 93.9 million mobile phones, which is up 5% from Q3 and only down 1% compared to Q4 2010.    

Another very interesting point noted within the latest interim report is the first payment Nokia received from Microsoft for its adoption of Windows Phone OS as its primary smartphone operating system.

“Our broad strategic agreement with Microsoft includes platform support payments from Microsoft to us as well as software royalty payments from us to Microsoft. In the fourth quarter 2011, we received the first quarterly platform support payment of $250 million [around R1.956 million],” the company stated within its Q4 interim report.

“We have a competitive software royalty structure, which includes minimum software royalty commitments. Over the life of the agreement, both the platform support payments and the minimum software royalty commitments are expected to measure in the billions of US Dollars.”

 

In related news Nokia also recently announced the sale of its 1.5 billionth Series 40 mobile phone.