HELSINKI, FINLAND: The struggling cellphone market has not yet touched bottom, the chief financial officer of top mobile phone maker Nokia was quoted as saying on Friday.

"We don't believe that the mobile phone markets have touched the bottom of this recession yet," CFO Rick Simonson told Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat.

"(But) the clearing out of inventories was brisk at the start of the year, which has increased our belief in the future," he added.

Nokia, on Thursday,reported a 27-percent fall in January-March sales and its first-ever quarterly pretax loss, but calmed jittery investors when it said it saw signs of stabilizing demand in the tumbling handset market.

Nokia chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said that while the firm believed the market was no longer in free-fall, it was too early to conclude that demand had touched bottom.