Reuters news agency reports that Nokia, the world’s largest phone manufacturer saw an increase in sales, particularly in emerging markets, but strong competition particularly for higher end phones such as Motorola’s Razr and Sony Ericsson’s Walkman Phone have made for some tough markets, particularly the usually strong Christmas Season.
Analysts still generally rate Nokia acumulate, however their sales in Asia and other rapidly growing markets need to be closely monitored. Any change downward in velocity there could portend a serious downturn for the phone manufacturing giant.
On a personal note, I expect large scale adoption of Nokia’s E Series phones by businesses as soon as they are widely available. With a slew of business oriented features including Push E-Mail VoWLAN access, WiFi for high speed web browsing, built in keyboards and the like, I know that I can hardly wait to test the E71 and other E series phones for myself.
Thanks for the report, very interesting to look at. I find it interesting to see the differences between where various manufacturers have success as well. For example, the two competitive phones you named to Nokia, the RAZR and SE’s Walkman line, are seemingly competing in very different spaces. Nokia has been aimed at the functional/smartphone/camera phone markets for quite a while, while their fashion phone offerings have seemed almost an aftersite, and their musicphone flagship, the N91, has of course yet to be released. The RAZR certainly appealed to the fashionistas of the world (before it became so ubiquitous that every 13 year old had one), and the Walkman phone was a clear (obviously by the branding) push into the emerging music phone market.
My point? I find it really interesting that, despite the different market aims of all of these phones, they still compete directly with one another.. showing just how homogenized the mobile market at large really is. In computing, you can draw a very distinct line between workstations, servers, business, home computing, laptops, etc, but that kind of stratification of the market hasn’t really hit mobiles yet.
Thanks!
-olly
I agree with Olly. The RAZR isn’t really a high end phone. I’m not picking on the RAZR but making that point that in the US market you could consider it a high end phone simply because it’s not the freebie you get when you sign a contract at the local mall kiosk. The camera, UI and other features are simply not very noteworthy. It’s a phone, like so many others, that is sold based on sex appeal in a market where people care less about what the phone can do and more about what it looks like and what their friends have.
It’s interesting that at a time when carriers are desperately seeking ways to generate revenue from something other than voice minutes the low end fashion phones still get the spotlight. It seems that having a high volume of feature starved phones on the network would be something of a problem.
Perhaps that will begin to turn around when companies like EA, Clear Channel, Yahoo and Google help “average joe” realize that there’s more to that phone in their pocket than making voice calls.