Nokia, the world's leading mobile handset maker, expects its sales and market share to pick up next year, with growth driven by the US and Chinese markets, a senior Nokia official said yesterday.
Shares in the Finnish firm earlier dropped to around €14.45, near nine-month lows, on continued investor concern over the mobile phone market outlook.
"We believe growth will re-accelerate next year," chief financial officer Mr Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told an international conference in Budapest.
"China has great upside, as has the US with WCDMA," he said, referring to a third-generation wireless technology enabling high-bandwidth and always-on internet connections for mobile appliances like phone handsets.
Mr Kallasvuo also denied market talk that Nokia's first MMS-ready (multimedia messaging services) handset - the colour-screen 7650 with a built-in camera - would not be launched on time due to pre-production problems, insisting it would be on the market by the end of next month.
Currently, only SonyEricsson has an MMS-capable, colour- screen handset for GSM networks. Its market share was 6.4 per cent in the first quarter.
Comparative figures were not available as Sony and Ericsson set up their joint handset-making venture at the end of last year, aiming to become market leaders.
Mr Kallasvuo said the emergence of MMS, which allows users to send combined text, sound and image messages, would provide the long-awaited "excitement and fun" to revive sagging mobile phone sales.
In the first quarter, global industry mobile handset sales fell by 3.8 per cent year-on-year to 93.76 million units.
