Former Nokia executive slams current CEO, Stephen Elop, following disastrous third quarter results: “The handset equivalent of Dell”

Former Nokia executive Tomi Ahonen has published a blog post slamming the company’s current CEO, Stephen Elop, following the release of Nokia’s disastrous third quarter results.

On Friday, Smartcompany reported that Nokia announced a total operating loss of €576 million (about $A725.8 million) for the third quarter of 2012, with the company’s cash reserves dwindling from €4.2 billion ($A5.3 billion) to €3.56 billion ($A4.5 billion) quarter-over-quarter.

Nokia’s overall smartphone shipments stood at 6.3 million for the quarter, with Symbian smartphones outselling the company’s Windows Phone-based Lumias by a margin of 3.4 million to 2.9 million. In addition, the company sold 6.5 million of its Asha full-touch featurephones.

“When Stephen Elop announced his surprising Windows strategy on February 11, 2011, he promised a one-to-one transition from Symbian and that Windows would also start to take sales from featurephones. Now we have seen six quarters of [Elop’s] execution of that new strategy and four quarters of Lumia sales using [the] Windows platform,” Ahonen says.

“Nokia invented the smartphone. Nokia had QWERTY smarpthones for business before RIM’s BlackBerry. Nokia invented the consumer smartphone. Nokia had touch screens and an app store before the iPhone. Nokia saw the future, and was on the path to migrate its handset base faster than any of its rivals, and ahead of the industry average, to smartphones.”

“When Elop took over Nokia was at 23% [smartphone] migration when the industry was at 20%. Since then, under Elop’s management Nokia [has] regressed… Today Nokia’s smartphone migration rate is 7.5% and falling. Elop converted Nokia into the handset equivalent of Dell.”

“Nokia fell behind Apple in smartphones in the second quarter of 2011. Nokia fell behind Samsung in smartphones in the third quarter of 2011. Nokia fell behind Huawei in the second quarter of 2012. Now this quarter, Nokia tumbles out of the top five. It is now smaller in smartphone sales than RIM, HTC, ZTE, Sony and Lenovo. Nokia is currently ranked the ninth biggest smartphone maker and, depending on LG and Motorola, Nokia might fall out of the top 10. Nokia was bigger than these five companies combined when Elop took over.”

“When Elop took over, Nokia had 33% market share in smartphones. Today it is 4%.”

“The new Nokia OS that [Elop] tried to kill, MeeGo, will actually live longer than Windows Phone 7, the OS [he] preferred, now that Jolla will be releasing their first MeeGo-based smartphones next year.”