HELSINKI, April 21, 2011 (AFP) - The world's top mobile phone maker Nokia on Thursday a beat analyst expectations despite a slight fall in quarterly net profit, but its global mobile phone market share shrank further to 29 percent.

The company's net profit fell only 1.4 percent to 344 million euros ($503 million) from 349 million euros in the first quarter of 2010.

The number beat expectations by analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires, who had foreseen a net profit of 279 million euros.

Thursday marked Nokia's first quarterly results since its chief executive Steven Elop said in February the company, facing stark competition in the vital smartphone market from iPhone, Blackberry and Google, would abandon its own mobile operating system and start using one designed by Microsoft instead.

"In the first quarter, we shifted from defining our strategy to executing our strategy," Elop said in the earnings statement, adding "I am pleased to report that we signed our definitive agreement with Microsoft and already our product design and engineering work is well under way."

Following the news, Nokia shares surged by 3.12 percent to 6.12 euros on a Helsinki market up just 0.31 percent.

Nokia meanwhile reported its net sales were up 9.1 percent to 10.4 billion euros, compared to 9.5 billion a year earlier.

Nokia however said it expected mobile phone sales in the second quarter to fall from 7.1 billion euros in the first quarter to between 6.1 and 6.6 billion euros in the second quarter, with the third quarter around the same level, followed by a "seasonally higher" fourth quarter.

And the company's global mobile phone market share continued its downward slide, falling to 29 percent from 33 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and from 31 percent in the fourth quarter.

Nokia's radical strategy shift to dump the struggling Symbian platform is an effort to stop the downhill trend of its market share, which has plummeted from the 40 percent Nokia held in the first half of 2008.

"The first quarter is impacted by the same things that caused their market to fall last year, like the Symbian smartphones losing market share," Pohjola Bank analyst Hannu Rauhala told AFP.

FIM bank analyst Michael Schroeder agreed, pointing out to AFP that "Nokia's competitiveness will weaken faster going forward, until, at some point, Nokia makes the jump to the Windows Phone platform."

Elop said in February that Nokia's new smartphone strategy would result in "substantial" job losses.

Thursday's announcement held no details on the number of job cuts, with the company saying only that it hoped to decrease operating expenses by around a billion euros by 2013 "including a reduction in the number of employees and normal personnel attrition."

Speculations range from 2,000 to 6,000 lost jobs, with hundreds or thousands more lost among subcontractors.

At the end of the first quarter, Nokia said it employed 131,717 people worldwide.