Edible Apple

Nokia this week released their earnings for the second quarter of 2011 and things aren’t looking too good for the Finnish handset maker. During the quarter gone by, Nokia reported losses of 368 million euros (approximately $521 million), a figure far greater than the losses anticipated by analysts. And the scary thing is that Nokia’s losses would have been much larger had it not been for royalty payments and a one-time lump sum payment they received from Apple on account of their highly publicized licensing deal a few weeks back.

Notably,  Apple is now selling more iPhone’s per quarter than Nokia is selling smartphones in the aggregate.

During the most recent quarter, Apple sold 20.3 million iPhones, representing a 142% increase from the same quarter a year-ago. Nokia, meanwhile, sold 16.7 million smartphones during the quarter gone by. And while Apple sold 3.6 more million smartphones than Nokia, they derived 4 times as much in revenue from those sales. All in all, not too promising for what was once the world’s largest handset maker.

In terms of overall handset sales, Nokia shipments fell 20% to 88.5 million units, significantly lower than the 96 million estimate analysts were expecting.

The Next Web reports:

The Finnish company is now ranked as the third largest smartphone provider, behind Apple and Samsung. With the Korean-based vendor due to announce its financials later this week analysts have estimated that the company will have sold 19.5 million smartphones in the same period.

The Finnish vendor will be troubled by its latest figures, especially after holding the global lead in smartphone sales for 15 years. The company’s insistence on developing the Symbian platform resulted in a struggle to make its phones relevant again, despite superior smartphone hardware and build-quality.

Nokia of course is trying to regroup by hitching its wagon to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, but it’s an uphill battle for them and it doesn’t seem likely that Apple and Google will be ceding marketshare anytime soon.