The Finnish giant is the largest manufacturer of mobile phones on the planet and commands over half the market share in India. This is particularly reassuring at a time when it has been steadily losing its share globally.
New low-end phones
It is in this favorable scenario that the CEO has made clear that Nokia aims to expand its presence in India by offering more low-cost handsets. "India is our second-largest market. We aim to remove the affordability barrier," he told reporters. Nokia also has plans to offer an installment scheme for low end handsets. This will ensure more people get access to mobile telephony and eventually give the brand more leverage.
Shift from phones to services
Another paradigm shift for Nokia would be its gradual shift from being a manufacturer of devices, to a service provider. We have already seen examples of this in the form of services like Nokia Messaging and more notably for India, its Nokia Life Tools service which was introduced last year. Then, there is the Nokia Comes With Music Service which is an unique proposition it itself. Under this service, Nokia offers free downloadable music service minus the DRM headache. For the future, Nokia is working on its own push email technology. This would enable it to be on equal footing to compete with similar services provided by RIM on BlackBerry phones. This "shift" was also confirmed by Vineet Taneja, Marketing head for Nokia in India in an interview to Techtree last month. For "normal" consumers needing basic e-mail services, Nokia already has its Ovi Mail service that enables users to access emails right on their phones - even on select low-end handsets.
Netbooks coming soon
Apart from the aforementioned services, Nokia also seems interested in the fast growing Netbook segment. We had already known of Nokia's netbook intentions in the past. However, this time around, Nokia has given reasons for its rather keen interest in this segment. The reason is the convergence of the mobile and the personal computer. Nokia still does not have a concrete plan in place and will be seeing how it can see an opportunity for itself in this market. Additionally, if Nokia does ever eventually join the netbook bandwagon, it would be the first time that a mobile phone manufacturer will "move up" to make computers. All the while, it was PC makers entering the mobile phones segment and not vice versa as noted in this case. Best examples of this would be Acer, HP and Dell.
While Nokia has not laid out any specific plans or a target price range to increase its presence in the low end segment, it is clear why Nokia wants to further consolidate its presence in India. It is already the second largest market for mobile phones in terms of sheer numbers. It is not far behind China which leads the table currently. If that was not all, with over 10 million new subscribers added each month, it is, by far, the fastest growing mobile market in terms of new subscriber additions.
Source: Techtree.com
