Nokia: There may be trouble ahead

Interesting results out of Nokia this week: despite some promising numbers, like net sales up 28 percent year on year and device volumes up around about the same, it looks like the money men weren’t impressed by the results. Why? Nokia’s warning things won’t always be as rosy.

“Nokia expects the mobile device market to decline in value in Euro terms in 2008, compared to 2007. The change from our previous estimate of value growth for this market primarily reflects the negative impact of the recently weakened US dollar, the general economic slowdown in the US, and possibly going forward some economic slowdown in Europe,” the company said, and added that average selling price is expected to go down too.

There’s also discussions on how rising food prices will affect Nokia’s performance in emerging markets. According to Business Week, Nokia’s CEO said the chance there will be a knock on effect is “pretty remote. The mobile phone is a necessity item”. That sounds somewhat on the optimistic side to me, unless Nokia’s next line comes with Bluetooth, a two megapixel camera and a few loaves of free bread.