BERLIN — Nokia announced a third-quarter loss on Tuesday as the company continued with a makeover that includes selling its handset business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion.

The once mighty cellphone maker, based in Finland, will shed its handset unit early next year, and it is expected to focus on its mobile network infrastructure business.

On Tuesday, Nokia said that the restructuring was starting to help the network business’s profitability, although the unit reported a 33 percent fall in its third-quarter operating profit, to 218 million euros ($300 million). That figure was below a €228 million estimate based on an analyst survey by Reuters.

“The business is close to turning a corner,” said Pierre Ferragu, a telecommunications analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London. “Now the market understands it can be profitable.”