Nokia’s Q4 results showed that while the company is now seeing some positives from its strategic refocus, it is continuing to lose out in one of the mobile industry’s most important markets – China.

At the end of 2010, China was Nokia’s second-biggest market in revenue terms, behind only the company’s core European region.

However, by the fourth quarter of 2012, China had slipped into fifth place in significance for Nokia, with only North America – consistently the company’s worst performing region – below.

While Nokia’s total revenue has fallen by 54.6 percent over the nine quarters, and Europe has decreased by 60.8 percent, the decline for Greater China was 87.3 percent – by far the biggest loss across the regions.

Looking back, for a long time Nokia was the leading vendor in China, aided in no small part by its portfolio of devices supporting the TD-SCDMA 3G network of China Mobile, the world’s biggest operator by subscriber base.

With its Symbian OS devices, it was also able to carve-out an early lead in the country’s lucrative smartphone market.

However, with the shift to Windows Phone, it was unable to serve the needs of what is arguably the most important operator in the most important market with its latest products, and its Symbian device volumes have (unsurprisingly) tailed-off in the interim.

While Nokia’s attention was focused elsewhere, as in other markets Samsung was all too keen to step up to the plate, while local vendors such as Lenovo, ZTE and Huawei have also been aggressive.

With the announcement of its 920T late last year, Nokia is now able to target the subscribers of China Mobile again, as well as having already offered Lumia devices in this market for smaller player China Telecom.

But as with other markets, its recovery is far from a certainty. Windows Phone is not one of the preferred platforms in this market, where Android is far-and-away most popular – even if in many cases it has been “forked” away from the main, Google-backed version.

To put the collapse of Nokia’s Chinese activities in focus, in revenue terms it has dropped from being Nokia’s second largest market to the point where it is nearly on a par with the consistently poorly performing North American unit.

While Nokia’s core markets (including China and Europe) have collapsed, the company seems to have focused a disproportionate amount of effort on North America – where it has never been especially strong, even when the company was at its peak.

The US is generally among the first market to see new Nokia devices – initially through partnerships with AT&T and T-Mobile USA, but with Verizon Wireless also recently added through the roster – and the company has taken to holding launch events there.

At no point since Q4 2010 (the period examined here) has it not been Nokia’s smallest market both in revenue and volume terms.

And while the company is clearly going to invest a lot of effort to target customers in this market, it still shipped less than one million devices in this region in the last quarter of 2012 – compared with 2.6 million at the end of 2010, when it largely lacked operator support, and was offering devices powered by the Symbian OS platform. Nokia regional breakdown