Showing posts with label IDC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IDC. Show all posts

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
For More IIPM Info, Visit below mentioned IIPM articles.
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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
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