Nokia expects to ship over 500 million units in 2010, predicted Rick Simonson, the head of Nokia's mobile phones unit, who also defended the company's platform strategy.
Simonson, in a wide-ranging interview about Nokia's corporate strategy and vision, said in an interview with the Economic Times of India that the company's reliance on three platforms--Mameo, Symbian and its proprietary platform--would pay off.
The executive, who up until October was the company's CFO, said Nokia's dominating global reach will continue to attract support from application developers.
"There is definitely not enough room for more than 4-5 operating systems," he said. "Scale is critical. For instance, Palm's OS is very good, but with less than 1 percent of the global volumes, it won't be too appealing to developers."
Nokia's goal of 500 million units, which would include all three platforms, will be about 40 percent of the global cell phone market share. A Nokia spokesman told Reuters that Simonson's comments were not intended to be a new forecast, and that the company's latest forecast for 2010 was given at its investor conference in December. At that time, the handset maker said that while it expects its own market share to be flat in 2010, the overall handset market will grow by 10 percent. At the end of the third quarter, Nokia's global handset market share stood at 38 percent.
For more:
- see this Reuters article
- see this Economic Times article
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