Giles, a 48 year-old Australian engineering graduate, worked his way up to Nokia’s president of China over 15 years, then added the rest of northeast Asia before joining the executive team in Espoo. He was promoted to global head of sales in February when Elop announced the linkup with Microsoft.

A runner and triathlete, Giles carried the Olympic torch on the Great Wall during the Beijing Olympics.

“It makes sense that if you have a guy who’s been responsible for China earlier and has been successful in the job and now you have a situation where you need to change management, he’s probably able to hit the ground running,” said Sarkamies. “It’s an important job for the company and clearly one of the pain points for the time being.”

Quarterly Loss One advantage Nokia still enjoys is that it has one of the most extensive channel setups in China, working with operators and at the same time present in the tier 3 and tier 4 cities, said Gartner’s Milanesi. “They’re down to the small mom and pop shops,” she said.

Nokia yesterday reported a wider-than-expected net loss of 368 million euros, its second quarterly loss in two years. Boosting the handset division was 430 million euros in royalty payments on its patents, including a lump-sum payout from Apple after the June settlement of lawsuits about the iPhone.

The stock climbed 4.6 cents, or 1.1 percent, to 4.23 euros as of 10:44 a.m. in Helsinki. It has fallen 45 percent this year, valuing the company at 15.8 billion euros.

Android, which is used by dozens of handset vendors from Samsung Electronics Co. to backyard workshops in China, passed Symbian as the most popular smartphone operating system in the first quarter, according to Gartner. Sandy Shen, a Shanghai- based Gartner analyst, predicted that Android may account for 50 percent of smartphone share in Asia in 2015.