Focus now on smartphones, as Nokia exec's move seats

Paul Rasmussen — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:53:01 -0400

Having publicly blamed the troubled Nokia Siemens Networks JV for its Q3 loss of over €900 million, Nokia's CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, is now also holding responsible a lack of smartphone components for its poor performance in the mobile phone sector.

In an effort to wrench the company out of its steeply downward spiral, Kallasvuo has announced a reshuffle of its senior executives and split its bloated mobile phone division into two units. Smartphones will now become a separate unit under the direction of Nokia veteran Jo Harlow, with the objective of attempting to improve the quality and consumer appeal of its current lacklustre smartphone portfolio.

This acceptance that Nokia has manifestly failed to challenge the iPhone or Blackberry products might breathe fresh life into the company's smartphone ambitions. However, analysts are questioning how long Nokia can continue using the Symbian OS for the majority of its smartphones given its complexities and slow pace of development.

Harlow will also have the problem of capacity constraints that Kallasvuo said was behind the poor Q3 smartphone sales figures. "The constraints did in fact hit the smartphone part of the business more than the rest of the devices," said the CEO.

While the Smartphone division will be tasked with driving shipment numbers and keeping the margins high, the second unit, called Mobile Phones, will be run by Rick Simonson, currently Nokia's CFO, with a focus on low to mid-priced handsets. This will mean leading the portfolio, product and lifecycle management of all Series 30 and Series 40 devices, which account for more than half of Devices & Services net sales, representing a significant part of Nokia's business. Simonson will have overall responsibility for the sourcing of components for both the Smartphone and Mobile Phone divisions of Nokia.

This reshuffle is being seen by industry watchers as the company preparing Simonson for promotion to CEO at a later stage, noting that previous Nokia CEOs have come from a background as both CFO and head of mobile phones. What remains unsaid is how long Kallasvuo can remain as CEO of Nokia given his track record - albeit in economically difficult times.

For more on this story:
Financial Times

Nokia hints at higher than forecast growth

Paul Rasmussen — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:13:29 -0400

Having previously forecast that the cell phone market would grow by 10 per cent, the CFO of Nokia, Rick Simonson, has indicated that, 'with half a year visibility, we're able to say growth will be 10 per cent or more.' This upbeat assessment comes after the company posted better-than expected results for the second quarter which pushed Nokia's share price up by eight per cent--albeit that the company's share price had plunged about 40 per cent this year amid concerns the mobile industry would suffer as the credit crunch and inflation took their toll.

"Everybody's affected by the economic reality--Nokia and its customers are no different," said Simonson. "But we have an ability to play all markets. Some markets are growing strongly, some not so strongly but we aren't trapped to one market only. That's the beauty of it."

Nokia's CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, also added to this optimistic outlook by stating that the company had received good feedback about the broad range of new products it expected to sell in its handset business. Last week, Nokia indicated that increased demand from Russia and India would help it achieve continued growth this year.

For more on this story:
- go to CIO Today

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