Thursday, October 4, 2012

Nokia; Now Last in Customer Satisfaction

Bloodied by Market Losses in the Smartphone Category and Hit by Scathing Critique on its latest N8 Launch, Nokia’s Leadership Position is under Serious threat. Given its Reticent Posture, The Worst could come This Year.

They say that the customer is king. However, understanding the Indian customer has always been a tough task for business houses and corporations, especially for those who believed in legacy leaderships. The Indian telecom handsets category is a scathing eulogy, where the once quasi-monopoly Nokia has not only seen massive hits on its market share, it has also started floundering on the customer experience. As Gareth Halfacree writes in Enterprise Reviews on November 10, 2010, “With Apple’s iPhone Operating System and Google’s Android Platform cornering the market, interest in Symbian has been waning in recent years, and many believe that the N8 represents Nokia’s final attempt... If the N8 fails, so does Symbian as a viable platform.” And that’s where Nokia’s started getting the nervous shakes, as the N8 has already started getting calls of being hit with glitches.

Nokia is today struggling to maintain its market share. One of the key reasons for Nokia losing steam in the Indian market has its ongoing failure to catch the nerve of handset users. Telecom growth today is fast reaching people at the lower rungs of the pyramid, who have started looking for low priced and yet, feature rich phones. That is where the Indian branded handsets – with a simple business model of importing handsets on zero duty and selling them with an aggressive marketing strategy – now pose a serious threat to Nokia, which faces an equally daunting challenge on the high end from players like RIM and Apple.

Years 2009 and 2010 have been revealing. Only Samsung managed to retain its position. Korean giant LG and Sony Ericsson were thrown out of the top five chart. As per IDC, LG was the number two player in the quarter ending June 2008. The biggest setback was however to Nokia. Its share continued to fall and by the end of June, it constituted only 36.3% of the market as per IDC. This is the lowest ever since its entry into the Indian handset market. The handset manufacturer’s share by the end of Q4 of FY 2009-10 was pegged at 52%. When contacted, Nokia refrained for making any comment on the issue. An email sent to the company spokesperson remained unanswered till the filing of the report.

The Finnish giant, which commanded around 80% of the market share at one point, failed to understand the changing dynamics of the market in time. Nokia’s entry into the dual SIM segment was almost two years late. It continued to employ traditional QWERTY handsets with the business users. On the other hand, the competition redefined QWERTY key pad handset with social network functions to cater to multimedia users. Naveen Mishra, Lead Analyst - Telecom, IDC India opines, “In the last few quarters, shipments of mobile phones in the country have been growing, especially for models with features like long battery life, dual mode handsets (GSM & CDMA), QWERTY keypad, multimedia enabled (FM radio & MP3 player) handsets & phones with expandable memory slots.” The emerging players have brought such features at competitive prices. Nokia realised its mistake pretty late, and has only recently joined the multimedia QWERTY bandwagon with the launch of Nokia C3.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
 
IIPM : The B-School with a Human Face
at