Nokia Oyj isn’t just losing mobile- phone market share to iPhone maker Apple Inc. The Finnish company’s dominance in China, the world’s largest wireless market, is being eroded as prices sink, Bloomberg reported Saturday.
Nokia’s second-quarter handset shipments in China fell to 11.3 million, less than half the previous quarter’s number and 41 percent less than a year earlier. That, combined with a 30 percent drop in European sales, contributed to a greater-than- estimated 20 percent slump in Nokia’s handset sales worldwide.
At its earnings conference call on Friday, Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop said he had taken steps to address the build-up of inventory at Chinese resellers that helped trigger a profit warning in May, according to the report.
The inventory overhang could have been as many as 5 million handsets, the report said according to an estimate by Sami Sarkamies, a Helsinki-based analyst at Nordea.
