The Nokia story in the Indian market goes back to early 1990s when Indian market was going through a big change due to the dot com boom and other changes in the economy. The brand Nokia almost became generic to cell-phones. The Indian mobile phone market grew at a burgeoning pace at that time. Nokia being a market leader in Indian market saw great growth. Also, it started one of its largest manufacturing facilities in India.
In the present scenario, the mobile market is dominated by the demand of smartphones. Nokia however is not able to cope up with the technical competencies demonstrated by the market leaders in the smartphone segment – Samsung.
Nokia was the world’s largest seller of mobile phones. However, it saw its shipments down compared with Samsung, its core competitor.
Also, Nokia sold its main handset business to Microsoft. This deal is expected to raise the market share as it will strengthen the overall Windows Phone ecosystem.
Recommendations for increasing market share!
Nokia was synonymous to mobile phones in India, however Nokia could not match the pace with the rapid changing technology and increase in consumer expectations.
Samsung got the first mover advantage in the ‘Affordable Smart Phone’ category for the price sensitive yet tech savvy young consumers.
To make Nokia phones more attractive, some of the strategies that should be followed could be:
Lumia series interface should be made more easy to use, it has the same complexity problems as faced in Windows 8.
Nokia can target the difficulties faced by the people in the android phones, like high speed gaming, ease in using internet, provision of in built MS office applications, free apps download, plethora of new good apps by providing benefits to the app developers.
There can be two approaches to handle Nokia division in the coming decade:
Firstly, provide almost every feature of similar quality that is being provided by the most sought after android phones in lesser price or attractive handsets. While purchasing a smart phone, consumers mostly focus on the looks, screen size, sound, gaming, camera, app store and doesn’t bother much about the technicalities like speed and RAM
Secondly, focus on new and extra feature which is not yet present in the android phones just like few years ago the benefit app market provided to android phones, for e.g. extreme gaming experience, picture quality similar to a good camera and great editing features etc.
Today the social media, online shopping has provided the consumers a
platform for sharing and reading reviews, so if a customer is happy with
the product, information will pass on to the next customer, leading to
exponential increase in number of customers, so the need of the hour for
Nokia is to start observing the consumer trend, understand what
customer wants, improve upon what is it that makes their phone
attractive and remove those features which is making the operating
system and thereby the phone undesirable, investment in technology and
focus on the customer will help Nokia not only its current position but
also increase its market share.