We do not know how many Lumia handsets Nokia sold so far, but according to Digitimes initial shipments were pretty small, with Compal, the Lumia ODM, shipped less than 200,000 handsets (including whatever else they were doing) in October.
This ramped up in November to 600,000 units on the strength of Nokia’s orders, but again including whatever other handsets Compal is producing.
If the claim is true it does once again indicate, despite the size of the marketing campaign, that Nokia never planned to sell millions of Lumia handsets this year, something Stephen Elop always maintained, having said from the start that volume shipments will start in 2012.
Compal expects to benefit from the early 2012 push however, with Nokia expanding shipments to more than 30 countries, and expects to ship twice as many handsets in Q1 2012 as Q4 2011.
While these numbers are still small compared to the 19 million Symbian handsets Nokia shipped in Q3 2011 they are very significant in terms of the scale of current Windows Phone 7 shipments, and will hopefully expand the market massively in 2012.