Nokia (NYSE:NOK) shares declined sharply on Thursday after the company announced that it lost €969 million ($1.27 billion) in the third quarter, worse than the €68 million loss it posted in the same period last year. Analysts had expected a loss of just €610 million, the Associated Press noted.

The struggling Finnish handset maker said sales fell to €7.2 billion ($9.45 billion), down 19% from €8.9 billion in 2011. But that was better than the sales of €6.99 billion that analysts had anticipated.

Investors weren’t happy. Shares of Nokia fell more than 5% in Thursday afternoon trading in New York.

Nokia, once the leader in global mobile phone sales, has seen its market share drop as consumers switch to smartphones, pitting the company against Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone and smartphones running Google‘s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operation system, including those from Samsung.

The company has partnered with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) to make a line of phones using the Windows mobile operating system.

During the third-quarter, however, consumers held back on purchasing the Windows-based Lumia phones, perhaps awaiting the launch of Windows 8 later this year. Sales of Lumia phones tumbled to 2.9 million units during the third quarter, compared to 4 million units in the prior quarter.

Nokia said it did not expect a significant sales jump after the launch of the new operating system and warned that the current quarter remained “challenging.”

The company sold 83 million mobile devices during the third-quarter, down from 106 million last year.