Jyske Bank names Nokia shares a Buy, Lumia sales beat their expectations

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Nokia’s share price has recently fallen to a 14 year low, after it revealed a profit warning for the next 2 quarters.

Not all analysts are however scared away by the news. Analysts at Denmark’s Jyske Bank have maintained their Buy rating on the shares, noting analysts need to stop paying attention to flagging Symbian sales.

"We are now in the middle of the transformation from the Symbian to the Windows Phone platform. It hurts and makes heavy demands on investor patience. However, we maintain our BUY recommendation for Nokia, as we expect the efforts to be fruitful" Jyske said.

In fact Jyske reports Lumia sales, the future of the company, actually beat their expectations in Q1 2012.

"The only bright spot in connection with the announcement was that Nokia in Q1 sold more than 2m Lumia-smartphones compared to our estimate at 1.8m. As already mentioned, we believe that Nokia’s problems are primarily related to Symbian’s weakened competitiveness.”

"Symbian is a thing of Nokia’s past. It would have been much worse to us if the sale of Lumia smartphones had lost momentum. Nokia announced that it will raise its investments in Lumia in order to develop more smartphones and launch them in several markets."

Jyske Bank is not alone.  Nomura Securities maintained a ‘Neutral’ on Nokia, saying the sooner Nokia got rid of the Symbian poison, the better.

"…, the smaller revenues from Symbian get, the lower the risk of further downside surprise. Moreover, anyone owning Nokia is probably doing so with a view to capitalising on the company’s Windows Phone turnaround. Faster-than-expected declines in Symbian may just bring forward the bad news and allow any potential Windows  Phone-based recovery to have an undiluted impact on company earnings."

Windows Phones have higher Average Selling Prices vs Symbian handsets, and to generate the same revenue as 10 million Symbian handsets Nokia would have to sell only half the number of Windows Phones, a target likely achievable by Q3 2012.

More about the topics: analysts, nokia, windows phone 7.5