Finland’s Nokia has been putting its promotional muscle behind its new Lumia 800 smartphone, its first device built for the Windows Phone platform. However, rather than trying to make a big splash with the Lumia 800 in North America (where Nokia essentially withdrawn from the smartphone market in the last few years) the company instead has focused the Lumia 800 on Europe. However, Nokia may be facing a problem: Reuters reports a new survey from brokerage firm Exane BNP Paribas finds that Europeans just aren’t that interested: only 2.2 percent of surveyed buyers indicated they had strong intentions to buy the Lumia 800, which puts it well behind market leaders like the iPhone 4S and Samsung’s Galaxy S II.
As a result of the survey, Exane is lowering its price target on Nokia shares, kept its “underperform” rating on the stock, and lowered its estimate of Lumia 800 sales to just 800,000 units from an initial launch-quarter estimate of two million units. Nokia’s previous flagship phone, the N8, saw launch-quarter sales between 3.5 and 4 million units.
Exane’s survey could have a significant margin for error: From an initial pool of 1,300 respondents in five of the Lumia 800′s initial markets, purchasing preferences were derived from only 456 respondents who intended to purchase a smartphone in the next month. Nonetheless, they seem to align roughly with sales estimates from other analysts: Pacific Crest’s James Faucette lowered his firm’s estimates of 2 million units shipped to a “dissappointing” 500,000, according to Forbes.
Although aimed at the high end, Nokia sees the Lumia 800 as just the tip of the iceberg in its conversion to the Windows Phone platform. It forecasts the devices will gain traction as more products come to market — with one Nokia executive opining that the Windows Phone platform will be cool with cutting edge phone users because “everyone has the iPhone” but are frustrated by Android’s complexity and lack of security.
Nokia’s first Windows Phone will launch in the United States on January 11, 2012: the Nokia Lumia 710 to be available for $50 on T-Mobile.
Let us review Statistics 101 shall we. According to this “survey,” 456 out of 1300 random people are going to buy a smartphone in the next month. Assuming this so called survey was a representative sample (which it obviously was not) for the UK, Spain, Germany, Netherlands and France, this means 300,000,000 people * 35% = 94 million smartphone sales next month. Are you kidding me!
I think the analyst needs to take his medication and go on leave for a while. If you take the time to do some research, you will find the Lumia 800 at or near the top of every carrier best seller list in these countries where it recently went on sale.
Wow journalism on technology sites are really low. Everything they just copy from each other. Read one article and you have read them all. No opinion, no discussion, just a copy of another article. This is really sad.
I am amazed that anyone actually still wants to buy Nokia. Frankly, I live in Europe and I don’t know a single Nokia user! Their latest phone doesn’t even have front facing camera, so forget using Skype with it. This phone is probably good enough in 3rd world countries, but in US, Europe, Japan nobody will buy it.
You don’t need a front facing camera to use Skype. I have a camera on my desktop PC but I never use it with Skype. I prefer to stick with audio. You’ll probably find that many people prefer audio-only calls.
Honestly, the idea that a brokerage firm would base their analysis on a sample size of… 456 (potential smartphone buyers)? Which divided by the number of initial roll out countries, 5, is 91.2. How can anyone take these crackheads seriously? And how long did it take these so called research gurus to complete their study?
When will you guys realise that this is just a big scam by the analysts and brokers! They invent a story about Nokia performing poorly in the hope that the share price drops. They then buy the shares cheap and make a quick profit when the shares go back up again after the surveys prove to be inaccurate!
huh? Its not performing well, thats why the media hates it.
In Europe it IS performing well. The Nokia Lumia 800 is one of the best selling handsets.
I don’t buy it Lumia 800 is the #1 phone on many carriers in Europe