When we hear about reports such as these, we understand exactly why firms are willing to fight to the death over patents; it has been revealed, by a source at AppleInsider, that Nokia had recently made £370 million from a patent dispute with Apple, a figure which surpasses profits made from sales of the firm's Lumia Windows Phone 7 devices.
Nokia's not doing so great these days, having recently posted a £1.1 billion loss for the first quarter of 2012. Granted, the firm has invested a lot of money into refreshing its product line-ups and developing impressive new mobile camera tech. however, with mobile device sales dropping from €8.2 billion down to €6 billion over the same quarter last year, the firm's clearly in trouble.
It appears as though either the Lumia design or the Microsoft brand name only has serious appeal in the US, where sales have begun to recover fairly significantly from a 50 per cent drop over last year. The same can't be said for Europe and the UK, however, where overall sales have continued to drop at an ever increasing rate, with one of the firm's previous safe market havens, fast disappearing.
To rub salt into the wound, it was recently revealed that Korean firm, Samsung, had overtaken Nokia as the number one mobile vendor, whilst around the same time, global ratings agency, Fitch, downgraded Nokia's credit rating from BBB- to BB+, reflecting the firm's abysmal first quarter earnings.
Selling portions of its large patent portfolio could be the way to go to save Nokia in the short-term; though as a firm with £31 billion of revenues, we suspect that Nokia has a lot of fat to trim if it really got down to business.
