Microsoft shipped 4.5 million Lumia smartphones in Q4 2015

The Redmond company made public its fiscal Q2 2016 financials ending December 31, 2015 to generally disappointing results. The software giant faced a profit slump of 15 percent to 5 billion USD while sales were down 10 percent YoY to 23.8 billion USD.

Microsoft's performance in the smartphone world was hit hardest with a revenue drop of 49 percent YoY as only 4.5 million Lumia smartphones were sold in Q4 2015. This is compared to Q4 2014 where Microsoft was able to ship 10.5 million units a corresponding drop of 57 percent.

As reported earlier, IDC has estimated a global shipment volume of 399.5 million smartphones during Q4 2015. Thus, Microsoft accounted for just above 1 percent of the total volume. Microsoft's presence in the smartphone business has been declining despite the recent launches of the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL flagship smartphones. In contrast, the top 5 smartphone manufacturers have reportedly shipped more devices last year than they did in 2014.

On the other hand, Microsoft's Azure platform and Enterprise services are up YoY as Cloud-based computing has become more accessible.

The Lumia 950 XL in particular has proven itself to be a very respectable high-end handheld in an already saturated market according to our tests.

Source(s)