Another Milestone: Nokia 5800 Shipments Reach 3 Million

Nokia has just declared their quarterly results of Q1 2009 today. And its no surprise to see Nokia 5800 XpressMusic as the star performer. Nokia had sold 2.6 million units of 5800 this quarter which takes the total to an amazing 3 million mark. Earlier in last week of Jan, we witnessed the 1 million units of 5800 shipments.

However the overall sales of Nokia in this recession period fell to 9.27 billion euros from 12.66 billion euros last year. Profit was €4 million, compared to €1.2 billion a year ago. Also, despite the sales drop Nokia’s market share has steady at 37 percent over the past two quarters, based on the company’s own estimates.

On a geographic basis, Nokia’s handset sales were down 13.2 percent year-on-year in Europe to 22.3 million and fell 17.3 percent in Asia-Pacific to 28.2 million. North America was the only growth area, where sales rose 31 percent to 3.4 million phones.

Despite the drop, sales were still slightly higher than expected, according to Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. Although the market remained very challenging the good news today is that it is showing some signs that it is stabilizing, she said. She pointed to the fact that Nokia hasn’t changed its outlook for 2009.

“The inventory already in the sales channels decreased substantially during Q1 due to extensive destocking by operators and distributors,” Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a statement. “This adversely impacted our sales volumes in the quarter. However, it has also resulted in the demand picture becoming more predictable as we enter the second quarter.”

Note: A Nokia executive recently claimed that the firm had sold a whopping 13 Million 5800 Xpress Music handsets. The news spread all over the blogs and websites around the net. But sadly for Nokia though, the executive had confused the 5800 Xpress Music with the sales figures for the 5310 Xpress Music, according to a company Twitter feed. The 5310’s been available, in various designs, since 2007. Perhaps it’s an easy mistake to make, though? Especially since nearly all of Nokia’s phone models are named using mixtures of four numbers.

Well we are not surprised to see Nokia 5800 selling like hot cakes worldwide. We saw long queues of people and crowd going crazy on Nokia 5800 launches in UK, Russia, Thailand, Philippines, India, Hong Kong, and rest of the world. It is probably the stongest sales figures of any Nokia handset ever in 4 months period of launch.

Great going 5800!!