Nokia reported that net sales were up 12 percent Year-on-Year (YoY) for the third quarter of 2025, as the vendor posted double-digit growth in network infrastructure sales.

Overall profit during Q3 declined; however, the vendor's CEO Justin Hotard said that its mobile networks business is showing signs of "stabilizing."

For the quarter, Nokia reported net sales of €4.8 billion ($5.6bn), with its overall network infrastructure business reporting growth of 28 percent YoY.

The vendor also reported strong growth for its cloud and network services, with net sales up 13 percent. Nokia noted that this was because of strong operator investments in 5G Core.

Beyond this, optical networks grew 19 percent, which the vendor said was down to AI and cloud customers.

Sales for the mobile networks division were up four percent, as Hotard added that the unit is showing signs of stabilizing. This was driven by growth in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Africa.

"We have seen some improvements in CSP expectations along with the strong order intake I mentioned in AI and cloud. In fact, entering the fourth quarter, our backlog coverage is stronger than in recent years. We’re also pleased with our progress on the Infinera acquisition. We are ahead of schedule with the integration timeline and with synergy expectations," said Hotard, during an earnings call.

Hotard, who joined Nokia as CEO in April from Intel, where he previously led the data center and AI unit, also reiterated opportunities in the data center market.

"In Optical, as mentioned, our 800-gig ZR, ZR+ coherent pluggables became available in the quarter and shipped to our first hyperscale customer. Our pipeline in this space is growing as customer investments accelerate and data center architectures evolve," he said.

Hotard anticipates that the demand for AI technologies will drive the company's data center further.

Early 6G testing

Another technology that is slowly starting to generate more coverage in the industry is 6G.

The technology, which isn't anticipated to launch until the end of the decade at the earliest, also popped up during Nokia's earnings call.

Hotard said that Nokia is in the early stages of 6G testing.

"We’re doing work early on 6G — I’d say pre-standard 6G radio technology," said Hotard. "There’s more work here. I think the thing for me in this space is... there’s a lot of focus on, for obvious reasons, on the G transition, the 3G, 4G, 5G, 6G.

“There’s going to be a new generation of radios in terms of, hopefully, frequencies with spectrum approvals and, of course, 6G capabilities in terms of spectral efficiency. But there’s a lot more to do in terms of radio capabilities and features."

Separately today (October 27), a few days after announcing its earnings, Nokia, along with Swedish rival Ericsson, partnered with Berlin’s Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute (HHI) to drive the next generation of video coding standardization, aimed at driving "better immersive media and mobile video user experiences in the 6G era."