Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Have they mastered the Windows ‘application’ yet?

After quarters of misery, Nokia has been able to reassert its position in the Indian feature phone market with dual-SIM phones, and Microsoft promises an edge for it in the smartphone segment. However, it must play its cards well to be able to leverage on the same.

If you recollect your initial experience with mobile phones, interchangeable usage of the term ‘mobile’ and ‘Nokia’ would almost be a given. At a time when we aspired for ‘Made in India’ technology (actually we still do!), Nokia’s products educated customers and companies on what ‘Made for India’ could mean. The phones were sturdy and stylish by the standards of the day, sported easy functionality & enabled a mini ecosystem too. With so many Nokia users, being on low battery was hardly a concern. Someone around would have a charger handy for sure! It wasn’t by chance that Nokia became the undisputed king of the Indian mobile handset market, with market shares exceeding 80% at one time. Everything from the timing of the debut, to the India-focused strategies viz. low cost handsets like Nokia 1100 went in its favour. What could go wrong?

In marketing, one of the central facts of life is that you should “never say never”. At that time, we were awestruck by the fact that Nokia was once into lumbering and the brand name stood for a river. We knew that Google was a great search engine and that Apple had some fairly interesting computers we called Macs and a super cool music player we were falling in love with. Micromax would have sounded like an oxymoronic version of Microsoft, and mean little else (by the way, it’s the name of a fictional Marvel character who can change size at will!). Samsung, along with LG were becoming our favourites in the realm of consumer electronics. But the way these different players combined to give Nokia nightmares in India (and besides Micromax, in the global market too) in a span of 2-3 years shows that breaking status quo in today’s time isn’t as hard as it seems.

The greatest hit came from the most unexpected quarter. When Google flooded the market with its open operating system Android in 2008 by banking heavily on Nokia’s competitors like Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, the leader (which blindly trusted its Symbian OS) found itself struggling to keep the momentum going. Nokia was still ruling the charts with 31.8% market share in overall mobile shipments (6.8% more than Q2). But smartphone market share decreased from 45.8% in Q2 to 35.3% market share in Q3. It is closely followed by Samsung at 26% (IDC), which has been gaining steadily at the expense of Nokia. Where in 2008, relatively new players like Apple and Samsung gradually started gaining steam against Nokia’s dominance, Symbian became outdated within no time and Nokia was eventually forced to look for better alternatives. But even in the low cost handset market, which remained Nokia’s unconquered forte for long, handset players like Micromax, G’Five and even Samsung were making waves with there first mover’s advantage in the dual-SIM segment.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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