In 2020, HMD Global operated with 47 million euro loss on 1.2 billion euro revenue

The maker of Nokia phones HMD Global improved their financials during last year. The year 2020 will be remembered as one of the most challenging years in recent times, due to the outbreak of Coronavirus and measures that crippled a significant part of the economy to limit spreading of COVID.

Per data shared by mobiili.fi, HMD Global made 1.2 billion euro in revenue during 2020 – a 30% decrease from 1.7 billion euro in 2019. The company operated at a loss in last year, but the loss of 47 million euro is significantly lower than the 2019 loss of 295 million euro. In fact, it is the best financial result since HMD’s inception.

HMD Global stated that they delivered around 55 million Nokia phones during 2020 in an interview with Talouselama, which includes both smartphones and feature phones. HMD didn’t provide a breakdown between the two, but according to Counterpoint estimations (as a result of Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 reports) the Finns shipped around 8 million Nokia smartphones. The total numbers of smartphones and featurephones from HMD are higher than Counterpoint’s by around 8.4 million, but it’s not clear how many of the devices shipped are smartphones and how many featurephones.

Last year, the Finnish startup also received a 230 million USD investment from Google, Qualcomm, Nokia and others, and also started developing their software service HMD Connect.

While it is good to hear that HMD might soon become profitable on a yearly level, it’s clear that the ambitious plans of becoming the top 3 or top 5 smartphone vendor in the period of 3 to 5 years since the company entered the market aren’t anywhere close to being fulfilled. I’m wondering if that is still the goal or HMD’s leadership has another goal that hasn’t yet been communicated publicly.