Nokia struggles on to post €576m Q3 operating loss

Nokia has posted a dire set of third quarter financial results, with the Finnish firm revealing an operating loss of 576 million.

The ailing handset maker shipped just 6.3 million smartphones in the three month period, and only 2.9 million of these were its flagship Windows Phone Lumia devices.

In comparison, Apple sold five million iPhone 5 handsets in its first three days on sales, showing just how far Nokia has fallen behind the competition. Worldwide market leader, Samsung has also been performing exceptionally well, selling 20 million Galaxy S3 devices in 100 days.

CEO Stephen Elop claimed Nokia had expected a difficult quarter, a statement which has been commonplace place since he was appointed in 2010.

"In Q3, we continued to manage through a tough transitional quarter for our smart devices business as we shared the exciting innovation ahead with our new line of Lumia products," he said in a statement to investors.

"In our mobile phones business, the positive consumer response to our new Asha full touch smartphones translated into strong sales."

Elop made no mention of the flat Lumia shipments or his expectation for Windows Phone 8 devices, such as the Lumia 920, which is due to launch in November.

Analysts have been unsurprised by Nokia's poor results, and the outlook for the Q4 is not expected to be pleasant reading for sharehholders either.

"[I'm] not sure why people would have expected anything but a tough quarter from Nokia smart devices with no new products [and] non-Window Phone 8 upgradeable devices availble," noted Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at for Gartner's consumer devices.

"Q4 will be tough for most phone vendors as we see shift to a larger contribution to overall sales from emerging markets [and] hype moving to tablets."