Nokia experiences Q1 sales drop of close to 30%

Head of sales for Finnish Nokia steps down after the company reports $1.7B loss in Q1

Finnish phone manufacturer, Nokia, had a rough first quarter, with quarterly sales down to 7.4 billion euros, that's 3 billion euros less than last year's 10.4 billion euros in the first quarter a year ago. The company also reported a loss of 25 euro cents per share.

The earnings report, released Thursday, stated that the top sales executive Colin Giles is leaving the company.

This Q1 report seems to be the manifestation of all of the speculative struggles people were feeling as Nokia tried to battle against he smartphone leaders Android and Apple. 

In the report, CEO Stephan Elop pointed out that much of that loss was due to one-time restructuring costs. The company also singled out the three quarters of a billion in costs to the restructuring it did at the Nokia Siemens division, where it laid off 17,000 people earlier this year and the effect of severing 4,000 jobs  in Europe and South America.

Nokia did, however, warn the public and its investors that it could fall short of its near-break-even goal but as that didn't stop the company from experiencing a 4% drop in early morning trading on the NYSE..

“We are navigating through a significant company transition in an industry environment that continues to evolve and shift quickly,” Elop said in a statement. “Over the last year we have made progress on our new strategy, but we have faced greater than expected competitive challenges.”

Nokia experienced losses in the number of phones sold and the average price they were being sold at -- a terrible combination.

For this current quarter, Nokia said it plans to reduce its operating costs by $1 billion, compared to 2010 but still is warning the public that this quarter will also be a rough one when the earnings come out.

Nokia still has hopes to slow the slide with the its new Windows Phone 7, which launched in October. Nokia says the Windows operating system will be the main platform in its new phones, phasing out the MeeGo and Symbian platforms, considered clumsy by many operators.

Nokia has since launched several versions of Windows-based Lumia phones.

So far, Nokia has sold more than 2 million Windows-based Lumia phones in the first quarter and the company noted that it did receive $250 million in “platform support payments” from Microsoft during the quarter.