There has been a lot of talks about how poorly cellphone company Nokia has been doing ever since Apple’s iPhone came along and then a school of Android phones swept everyone off their feet.
Tech bloggers especially American pro Apple bloggers have been copying each others words over and over again, saying that there hasn’t been any changes in Nokia’s smartphones in years and that they should get rid of Symbian all together and follow what everyone else does by introducing Nokia’s own Android phone to safe the company or else it would no longer be in the cellphone business in just a few years.
One of these American bloggers recently asked why people in Europe still buy Nokia smartphone when there is iPhone and Android phones nowadays. The results were about how durable and long battery lasting as well as quality sounding Nokia phones are. The blogger then went ahead and commented that apparently (only to him perhaps) most people over there for some odd reasons don’t Twitt or update their Facebook status mobilely. Maybe or maybe they don’t but has this blogger even held a Nokia phone before or has he himself ever Twitted and/or updated his own Facebook status mobilely at all?! Cause if he had, he would know that Twitting or Facebook status updating mobilely does not require a smartphone. FYI, even Nokia S40 non smartphones could do all that. And no, neither Nokia nor its fans consider S40 phones as being smartphones.
The same blogger laughs at Nokia and asks why they can’t compete with Apple in the US Continent; in fact the same question can be asked from a different point of view – why does Apple only win out Nokia in the US Continent alone?
There is also an interesting point in that one of the bloggers in that particular blog site had a recent legal issue vs Apple…
Back to the point. These bloggers on one hand saying that it is all about high profit margins not being market leading and if Nokia does not make drastic changes immediately they would fall out of the cellphone business; yet on the other hand when Nokia fired their CEO, hires another, with another department director resigned, to them that’s a “turmoil” for Nokia. Huh? If Nokia didn’t do it right, how is those been responsible leaving the company a turmoil to the company? If it were a turmoil, were these leaving head of company right to begin with?! Make up your minds, alright?!
Nokia’s soon to leave chief smartphone person, Anssi Vanjoki, who declared that Nokia switching to Android now would be like peeing in their pants to keep warm in the winter. I agree with him on this point. Android is not the holy grail for smartphone business. At this same “Nokia turmoil” moment, LG’s replaced their own CEO to take accountability for ongoing distressed handset business for the company. Yet as recently as this January, LG’s CEO said about half of LG’s new smartphones will run Android. Other companies with cellphone business and Android smartphone products are not doing nearly as well as HTC, Samsung, and Motorola does either, namely Acer and even Sony.
Why would everyone want a generic or similar looking smartphone to everyone else anyway? The popularity of a phone depends more upon its look than its function. Unlike techno geeks and gear heads, the general public usually choose a phone by its looks first before they look into its functions. Others may have function specific needs. Seldom does people ask which OS a cellphone is running before other considerations let alone knowing what different OSs are and offer.
I would not go into details with the obvious advantages of each and every smartphone OS/hardware here. They each have their merits and advantages as well as their own fair shares of shortcomings. That is not my intention for this message. No doubt that Nokia being one of the first if not the first to start the world’s smartphone business naturally their market share would drop drastically when other companies follow suit into the same business with decent products. Even Apple’s “almighty” iPhone has lost some of their share of the smartphone market when locust like Android phones swamped the market. The fact of the matter is, despite the smartphone market might be growing faster than any other products in the world in recent years, it is still a relatively small market compared to the market of all cellphones. Not everyone likes to use a smartphone and even less for a full touch screen smartphone for these specific people. The world is always going to have a need for dumb cellphones no matter how much prices of smartphones will drop. Some taxi cab drivers in HK are using as many as 7 dumb cellphones all at once while driving – all Nokias. They use them for the Push To Talk function as walkie-talkies with fellow cab drivers to organize phone-in customer pickups. Some not as wealthy countries still use cellphones without even having a display of any kind!
Surely having a popular high profit margin product is every company’s dream but it is not exactly a sign of a company’s good health. Like the automobile industry for instance, Lamborghini has only supercars and they have been rather popular since the 70s but they had been down and almost completely out several times within these past 4 decades. Ferrari don’t have any true family cars either and is much more popular and have been doing much better than Lamborghini, they too had been bought by Fiat once. Countless supercar companies with high margin products had come and gone. Several are single model supercar companies like Bugatti. Yet it is Toyota that is now leading the automobile industry after GM. Granted that GM flopped recently which made way for Toyota, but like Audi bought Lamborghini, Fiat bought Ferreri, BMW bought Rolls-Royce etc, it is always the company with a variety of products that wins out in the end.
And for those who think Nokia does not have a high profit margin product, let me remind you that Nokia has the highest profit margin cellphones product in the world, ever – Vertu.
And for those who thought that Nokia is a cellphone company which does not know how and cannot make changes big enough to turn itself around (turn around from market leader to what anyway?), let me remind you that Nokia was originally a rubber boot company and it turned itself into one of the largest communication system company in the world if not the largest, which prime business is still selling total mobile phone system solutions to large cooperates and service providers rather than simply cellphones to the end users.
Nokia’s 40% smartphone world market shares will drop by a large margin before rising again but Nokia being the shear size of the company with utmost commitment to being the world leader in the market, it is going to stay in the top of the world market. Changes are necessary in order to keep at that. Changes have already been made in the past few years and more changes are being made. The truth is, changes had been made all along in their hardware as well as the Symbian software perhaps even more so than anyone else, it is just that those who do not care to look further past the name of the hardware and software company and product, to actually study their products or even have one on hand, either doesn’t know or down right omit them all together for easy continuing message spamming as their “analytic” works.
If anything, I’d start worrying about RIM if I were a business investing agent looking into the cellphone market. But that’s another topic.
Mark my words for it.
WhaUSay?!