Nokia will report its 4th-quarter 2013 earnings tomorrow, a seminal moment for the organization because the figures will represent the final full period that will own the hardware assets that it’s supplying Microsoft.

Additionally, it matters as Nokia’s Lumia Home windows Phone sales within the quarter will give you a study card of sorts for Microsoft. Given that Nokia makes and sells the huge most of Home windows Phone products, its sales are proxy for that bigger marketplace for the phones. Therefore if Nokia were built with a good quarter selling Lumias, Microsoft were built with a good quarter selling Home windows Phones.

Microsoft will report its earnings later within the day.

Nokia offered 8.8 million Lumia products in the third quarter of 2013. Given extant growth trends, we’d expect Nokia money phones within the 4th quarter. Add some inescapable fact the period includes the vacation sales cycle, so we expect another bump. Which means that Nokia should sell easily greater than ten million Lumia mobile phone models within the quarter.

The stakes listed here are high for Nokia, considering that it is difficult to win within this context, but super easy to get rid of. Whether it sells 11.5 million mobile phone models rather than 11 I doubt individuals will laud it. But an inadequate number could cast a pall. The irony would be that the resource under consideration is exactly what the organization is selling, so an adverse result might not have as sharp an effect on its share cost because it otherwise might.

Traders expect Nokia to earn around €0.08 ($.11) in the quarter on revenue of €6.4 billion ($8.671 billion). It is going to be interesting to parse the organization’s earnings because it expects to mark the assets it’s selling as stopped companies. Nokia will significantly change once it and Microsoft obvious the ultimate regulating hurdles that sit between their consummation.

For that full-year period, Nokia is anticipated to earn €0.07 ($.09) (on aggregate revenue of €23.7 billion ($32.11 billion) in revenue. That latter figure is really a firm decline from the 2012 tally of €30.2 billion ($40.92 billion). And Nokia, selling off another slice of revenue, is going to slim again.

To ensure that is that. Keep an eye on the Lumia number, because it matters for firms.