Nokia sold 4.4 million Lumia in Q4 2012, beats outlook and shares surge pre-market

Nokia has just announced its preliminary round-up of the Holiday fourth-quarter of 2012 and it managed to beat expectations for its devices and services departments, and its shares surged nearly 20% in pre-market trading on this news.

Nokia was happy to announce both its Lumia lineup of Windows Phone devices and its dumbphones sold better than expected with Nokia Lumia sales amounting to 4.4 million. Overall, smartphone sales stood at 6.6 million.

The company also had lower than expected operating expenses, and has achieved underlying profitability in Q4 2012.

This is some good news for the struggling Finnish phone maker, but the real question is whether Nokia can keep on growing. At the same time, the company warned that it forecasts a weaker Q1 2013 due to seasonality.

“We are pleased that Q4 2012 was a solid quarter where we exceeded expectations and delivered underlying profitability in Devices & Services and record underlying profitability in Nokia Siemens Networks. We focused on our priorities and as a result we sold a total of 14 million Asha smartphones and Lumia smartphones while managing our costs efficiently, and Nokia Siemens Networks delivered yet another very good quarter,” chief executive Stephen Elop commented.

Interestingly enough, while Elop and Nokia continue to speak about Asha phones as smartphones (when they are clearly not), its accountants are more realistic and put the Asha lineup in Nokia’s feature phone statistics.

Here is how Nokia’s Q4 2012 sales break down:

• Mobile phones (read, feature phones): 79.6 million
• of which Asha full-touch phones: 9.3 million
• Smart devices: 6.6 million
• of which Lumia Windows Phones: 4.4 million

source: Nokia