Nokia ups the ante, tries to reclaim lost ground

Head of Category Marketing confident despite the havoc wreaked by competitors to his company’s smartphone sales.

Henri Mattila from Nokia is confident despite the havoc wreaked by competitors to his company’s smartphone sales over the past year – he carries four N8s in his pocket.

Mattila, Nokia’s Head of Category Marketing for Middle East and Africa, is in Pakistan for the launch of the N8, a phone that the company hopes will take back what it has lost in smartphone sales earlier this year. The phone runs on Nokia’s Symbian 3 operating system and hopes to take on Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and of course, the BlackBerry.

He has good reason to be so sure about his company being able to take back the ground it has lost: it is because this is the company that pioneered the mobile phone and he has worked with it for 11 years. He does not really see where the Finnish phone giant could go wrong.

Mattila may be right because despite a decline of 10 per cent from 2009, Nokia still holds 41 per cent of the smartphone market, according to Gartner research. However, most of its losses in smartphone sales have been partly due to the Symbian, the current operating system running on most Nokia phones, according to the same research.

“We may have had a bit of a hard time,” admitted Mattila with an unassuming smile. The company, which up till now had been trailing behind on software because of the importance they gave to hardware, appears to be finally heading in the right direction.

“Software is going to be important,” added Mattila, excited about the ‘new’ Nokia and the direction the company is taking. “The company is moving from being hardware-oriented to more of an end-product mobile communication solution company: one that aims to give consumers a complete integrated package instead of just great hardware.”

Furnishing further details on software, Mattila explained that Nokia has “a whole range of phones running Symbian operating system and an extremely competitive portfolio. However, the ace up our sleeve is the MeeGo, slated for release in the first half of next year.”

MeeGo, a collaboration between Nokia and Intel to make an operating system that can compete with current smartphone offerings, is making analysts anxious about what would happen if the joint venture is not successful. A parting of ways could leave MeeGo device users without any support.

“Even if Nokia and Intel do call it quits,” counters Mattila, “the operating system will keep going because it is open source. All the same, I have absolute confidence that MeeGo will be a resounding success.”

Many are curious whether they will be able to install the MeeGo on their N8s when the operating system is finally released. Unfortunately, there would be no crossing over from Symbian to MeeGo and both operating systems would continue to receive respective updates, disclosed Mattila.

Meanwhile, Mattila sees no flaws in Nokia’s Symbian and, unfortunately for innovation, he might be right. “There are 200 million users who are used to the controls of the Symbian,” he explained, “the real ‘battle’ is getting all the consumers to migrate upward slowly and make the learning process very simple.”

In a convoluted way, Mattila does make sense. There are millions of people who are used to the basic Nokia control scheme, and as flawed as the scheme may be, capitalising on it seems to be a smart idea. Who needs an intuitive user interface when you have more than 200 million customers who are used to your own control scheme?

“We are expanding the market band and bringing the smartphone to the general public,” says Mattila. The irony is that the N8 (the phone he was here to launch) costs around Rs45,000 – a lot of money for the average Pakistani.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 3^rd, 2010.