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Nokia: We over invested in the U.S. market
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Nokia chief Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said his company has "over invested" in R&D in the U.S. market, and instead will pursue an incremental strategy of expanding its portfolio in the market rather than looking for the silver bullet in the mid-priced handset range. The U.S. market represents less than 10 percent of Nokia's annual global shipments, and Nokia never gained a foothold in the U.S. CDMA market, which it bowed out of earlier this year. Kallusvuo said there was "no magic bullet" that would help Nokia gain more market share, only that the task required "hard work and more hard work." Of the four slim phones the world's largest handset maker introduced yesterday, only one might work in the U.S. on T-Mobile's network. The Nokia 6086 is a mass-market UMA phone that supports quad-band GSM, but it looks like T-Mobile will have to heavily subsidize it to make it appeal to the mass market.
For more about Nokia's U.S. struggles:
- check out this article from RCR Wireless News
Comments
Posted by Jim-san | November 30, 2006 - 1:52pm
That's a pretty funny comment from Olli-Pekka about over investing in the US Market. He should have said "we grossly squandered our R&D efforts in the US by trying to bring Euro-centric designs to this market when all of our US customers were telling us to bring designs that appealed to the US market, such as slim clam-shells and large screen PDAs like TREO." Nokia's arrogant approach to this market has hurt them for years. Their big success with the 6160 convinced them that the US consumer loved small screen candy-bar styles, when what was really going on was that the customer loved the one-rate price plans that were featured with the 6160. A little less wax in their ears might be the best corporate strategy to adopt at this point!
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