The Finnish company placed 5.6 million units of its model Lumia in 1st quarter, compared to 4.4 million the previous quarter. A big drop in sales of basic phones from Nokia overshadowed a stronger performance from its Lumia smartphone in the first quarter, and the company said Thursday that it estimated that operating margins will deteriorate.

Nokia, relegated behind Samsung and Apple in the Smartphone business, said that it sold 5.6 million units of its Lumia model in the first quarter, compared to the 4.4 million units in the previous quarter and in line with expectations.

But overall net sales fell by 20%, to 5.9 billion euros compared to the previous year, while volumes of phones plunged 30% on the previous quarter.

The company forecasts that margins in its devices and services business will be “approximately a 2% negative” in the second quarter, from a positive 0.1% in the first quarter.

“The fall is on the side of phones cheaper, where both volume as the average selling price was lower than expected.” Of course that’s a little disappointing, since that has been its key devices and services unit business,”said Hakan Wranne, analyst of Swedbank.

“I think that we will see a fall is your expectations of earnings for 2014”, added the analyst.

ELOP TO HEAD
Investors are increasingly impatient with the results achieved by CEO Stephen Elop, who was hired in 2010 to lead a change in the company and took the decision to adopt the Windows software for your devices at the beginning of 2011.

Elop said that the transition would take him two years, a period that has ended, which generates more questions about how long have left you to show that the company is on the right track.

While Nokia still sells more regular mobile phones than smartphones, its future depends on these latest devices – which leave more room-, as a growing number of consumers want access to applications like Twitter on their cell phones.

The two main players in the smartphone segment show few signs of yielding market share. A Reuters poll showed that the market expects Samsung dispatched 61.6 million smartphones in the first quarter, while Apple sold 36.9 million iPhones.