Nokia announced financial and operational goals for the coming year, emphasizing an improved user experience for Symbian and modest growth in its own market value.
The company outlined the plans at its Capital Market Days event in Helsinki, Finland. Nokia predicts that overall mobile device volume will be up 10 percent in 2010. However, the company said that its own market volume will remain flat compared to 2009.
Additionally, Nokia said that average selling prices for its mobile devices will continue to erode in 2010 compared to recent years. However, the company will apparently seek to re-engineer the Symbian UI and deliver one major product milestone before mid-year and another before the end of the year.
The company said it will target operating expenses of €5.7 billion for its devices and services sector, with an operating margin of 12 percent to 14 percent in 2010.
Nokia said that it hopes to grow net sales of services to €2 billion or more by 2011. Nokia targets 300 million active users of its services in the same timeframe.
Additional targets include a Maemo 6-powered mobile computer in the second half of 2010, an increased proportion of touch and/or qwerty devices and an increased scale and reach of services. Improvements to services include the provision of more tools for developers.
Just yesterday, Nokia released the latest version of its cross-platform application and user interface framework. The Qt 4.6 features new platform support, graphical capabilities and support for multi-touch and gestures. It also includes support for the Symbian platform for the first time and adds Windows 7, Apple Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and the upcoming Maemo 6 to the list of Qt-supported platforms. Support for Maemo 5 is currently in development, with the second technology preview being released today.
Meanwhile, Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks expect a flat market in euro terms for the mobile and fixed infrastructure and related services market in 2010, as compared to 2009. However, hopes are that Nokia Siemens Networks will grow faster than the market in the coming year. Nokia Siemens Networks targets a non-IFRS operating margin of break-even to 2 percent in 2010.
After seeing Nokia’s targets, Maynard Um, analyst for UBS Research, kept Nokia at a “‘Neutral” rating. “Overall, we believe consensus forecasts don’t change much on this but it is slightly disappointing that Nokia (has) not set the bar higher on margins,” Um said in a research note.
