Nokia: Q4 mobile phone sales beat own forecast

The Finnish company's share price surged 11 percent to close at €3.32 on Helsinki Stock Exchange.

Nokia said it sold 86 million devices in the last three months of 2012, including some 4.5 million Lumia smartphones, while revenues amounted to some €3.9 billion. A year earlier, it posted a fourth-quarter net loss of €1 billion with a 19-percent plunge in revenue.

The cellphone maker said it sold 15.9 million smartphones in the quarter, up from 6.3 million in the previous quarter.

Nokia has been struggling in the fierce top-end race against Apple Inc. and Samsung and is now also losing ground to Asian makers in lower-end devices. Samsung overtook it as the world's No. 1 cellphone maker early last year after Nokia led the field for 14 years. In 2011, Nokia announced that it would join forces with Microsoft to produce a smartphone that would run on Windows software. The latest Windows handset, the Lumia was launched last year.

CEO Stephen Elop said he was pleased with the company's "solid" fourth-quarter performance.