This One Stat Tells Us How Desperate Nokia Was For Microsoft To Rescue It

Nokia CEO Stephen ElopNokia would have us believe that its $7.2 billion deal to sell its smartphone business to Microsoft comes from a position of strength. Risto Siilasmaa, Nokia's board chairman, said today, "For Nokia, this is an important moment of reinvention and from a position of financial strength, we can build our next chapter."

But take a look at Nokia's financials. In Q2 2013, it reported revenues of 5.7 billion euros, down 24% from the year before.

That's a company in full-scale collapse. And if you want to know what that looks like in the real world of phone sales, then check out this terrifying statistic reported by The New York Times this morning: Nokia's Asian market share has fallen from 64% to just 1%:

Nokia's fall has been most spectacular in Asia, a region that its phones once dominated. As recently as 2010, the company had a 64 percent share of the smartphone market in China, according to Canalys, a research firm. By the first half of this year, that had plunged to 1 percent.

That's the very definition of a "burning platform," as Nokia CEO Stephen Elop once put it.