HELSINKI (AFP) - Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is expected to post earnings at the high end of its estimates on Thursday after recently enjoying a surge in its market share.
"The outlook for Nokia is quite positive, and I believe that they will come in at the upper end of their guidance," Erkki Vesola, telecom analyst with investment bank Mandatum, told AFP.
Upbeat analyst comments are good news for Nokia, whose abysmal results in the first half of the year sent technology stocks around the world skidding and prompted economists to worry that the mobile goliath played too dominant a role in the Finnish economy.
Nokia's problems in the first two quarters largely were attributed to its failure to pay attention to the popularity of fold-out clamshell phones.
Since then however, the world's largest mobile phone maker has managed to regain market share by lowering prices on several of its handsets.
This strategy has begun paying off, allowing Nokia to greatly increase its volumes, according to Hannu Rauhala, an analyst with brokerage Opstock Securities.
The consensus of market observers polled by AFP's financial news service AFX was that Nokia would post earnings per share (EPS) at the high end of its estimates of 0.13 euros (0.16 dollars) for its third quarter on the back of 6.92 billion euros (8.58 billion dollars) profit.
Nokia in September hiked its EPS guidance for the third quarter to between 0.11 and 0.13 euros, up from the between 0.08- and 0.10-euro guidance it had given in July.
It also adjusted upwards its sales expectations for the three-month period to between 6.8 billion and 6.9 billion euros, from between 6.6 billion and 6.8 billion euros previously indicated.
"It was evident that when they gave their third-quarter guidance in July, it was very low key to ensure that it would be met, and in hindsight it was not surprising that they upped their estimates (in September)," Vesola concluded.
Nokia is not the only telecom company expected to post strong results this week.
Also reporting results on Thursday is Swedish rival Ericsson's recently loss-making 50-50 joint venture with Japanese group Sony, Sony Ericsson.
Sony Ericsson is expected to report further growth in the third quarter, after stunning investors in the second quarter with a 34-percent increase in cellphone sales -- largely due to its popular camera phones.
"From quarter to quarter, growth in our sales and profits is accelerating," Sony Ericsson chief executive Miles Flint recently said in an interview with French daily Le Monde.
Sony Ericsson, however, remains the world's fifth largest mobile phone maker, with its 1.5 billion euros in cellphone sales in the second quarter dwarfed by world-leader Nokia's sales of 4.2 billion euros.