Nokia shipped a record 8.8M Lumias last quarter (though profits are still slim)

This might surprise you, but somewhere out there, people are actually buying Nokia Lumias.

Lots of them, actually. In fact, Nokia says it shipped a record 8.8 million Lumias during the third quarter, a significant increase over the 7.4 million Lumias it shipped in the previous quarter and a 366 percent increase year-over-year.

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Also significant is Nokia’s success in North America, where Lumia shipments doubled to 1.4 million from 700,000 in the previous quarter. Put another way, North America’s share of Nokia’s overall Lumia shipments climbed from nine percent in the second quarter to 16 percent this time around.

While those numbers may pale in comparison to the 33.9 million iPhones Apple sold last quarter, they’re still a sign that, whatever Nokia’s doing, it’s working. Slowly.

The record shipments follow Nokia’s release of the Lumia 928 (Verizon’s first high-end Lumia), as well as the budget Lumia 520 and Lumia 521, which are likely where the bulk of the sales are coming from. Nokia also shipped the 41-megapixel Lumia 1020 back in July.

All of this is certainly great news for Microsoft, which acquired Nokia’s hardware business in the hopes that its $7.2 billion investment would pay off. And and so far, it looks like it just might do so.

Overall, Nokia’s record Lumia sales helped the company pull in $162 million in profit on $7.79 billion in revenue. The company last quarter reported an operating loss of $151 million. Nokia’s devices and services division lost $118 million.