HMD: 70 million Nokia phones shipped in 2017

Alongside interesting smartphones and feature phones, HMD Global publicly shared some interesting data about the company’s performance on the market during the last year. The biggest news is probably HMD first time coming out with sales figures. Previously we heard estimates from IDC that HMD shipped about 60 million feature phones and from Counterpoint Research that the company shipped about 8.7 million smartphones. HMD’s CEO Florian Seiche on the press event officially announced that in its first year of operation (2017) HMD Global shipped 70 million Nokia devices.

Florian didn’t break this result in details, or more precise “smartphone vs. feature phones”, but he added that HMD has become the worlds biggest feature phone vendor by value in 2017, meaning that HMD earned the most money from selling feature phones in 2017, even though he ended up second in market share, according to IDC. Nokia is already in top 5 smartphone brands in 15 countries, Seiche added.

In one year, HMD established operations in 80 countries and the new Nokia phones are being sold in more than 170 markets. Over 600 direct operator, retail and distribution partners work with HMD in spreading the Nokia-branded devices via 250,000 retail outlets globally. Other interesting statistics are that 2/3 Nokia customers are younger than 35, so Nokia is not only an old people’s brand.

For 2018, HMD announced that the company will focus on expanding the portfolio, increasing the market presence and bringing innovation “where it adds more to your life”, said Seiche. It’s interesting that the innovation slide is depicted with a camera. Don’t want to insinuate something, so I’ll just leave this link here.

Overall, an interesting MWC passed and HMD had a solid comeback year. 2018 is set to be even better with a promising portfolio that we can’t wait to get into our hands.