Nokia pulled a little trick when reporting their Q4 2011 financial results this afternoon. They said Lumia sales topped 1 million units “to date”. Now what does “to date” mean to you? To me it includes everything until today, which in this case happens to be the 26th of January. Chris Davies, from SlashGear, saw my tweets asking a question about the language Nokia was using, so he did the smart thing and contacted Nokia’s press people to get some clarification. They confirmed that the 1 million “to date” figure includes Lumia devices sold until January 26th. In that case, how many Windows Phones did Nokia actually sell in Q4?
I hope an analyst asks Nokia to clarify what “1 million to date” means. Does that mean up to today, Jan 26th, or 1 million in Q4 2011?
— Stefan Constantine (@WhatTheBit) January 26, 2012
Doing some quick math, assuming Nokia sold exactly 1 million Lumias, there are 72 days between the 16th of November (when the Lumia 800 went on sale in the UK) and today. In other words, Nokia sold an average of 13,889 Lumias per day. But since we want to figure out how many devices Nokia sold in Q4, we have to count the days between November 16th and December 31st. That’s 46 days.
13,889 Lumias x 46 days = 638,894 Lumias sold.
That can’t be right … right?