Thursday, March 19, 2009

Numbers of Mobility

Some numbers that describe mobile industry in March 2009 (statistic numbers from Gartner). Please judge by yourself what this all means and if Nokia is doing the right things in the smartphone arena.



-16.8% is the number how much Nokia’s smart phone sales decreased Q4/2008 compared to last year.

0€ is the price an iPhone user has to pay to get phone operating system upgraded to the most recent level. Update will be available this summer.

0€ is the price a Nokia user has to pay to get phone operating system upgraded to the most recent level. Update will not be available (source: Nokia).

2 is the number of different iPhone models available today.

3.7% is the number how much smart phone sales in general increased Q4/2008.

78 is the number of different Nokia phones available in Finland today. (source: product listing at nokia.fi)

84.9% is the year-on-year growth in RIM’s sales.

111.6% is the year-on-year growth in iPhone sales.

138% is the year-on-year growth in Samsung smartphone sales.

1000 is the number of voluntary resignation packages offered to Nokia employees (source: Nokia).

1700 is the number of Nokia R&D people that are affected by the company’s latest cost reductions (source: Nokia).

2500 is the number of people that will be affected by lay-offs in factory at Salo when phone production is scaled down to meet the market demand (source: Nokia).



The list is pessimistic to shake you up, but clearly there’s something wrong with the way Nokia now performs. The number of different terminal models is huge (compared to competitors) and it is changing rapidly, too. As soon as you buy the terminal there’s something “better” already available and user is told that upgrade will not be available. Wake up Nokia, competitors outperform here!

For quite a long time I’ve been annoyed by the gap there is between product launch and product's actual availability, at least when it comes to the flagship models. The marketing heat is on after the launch, but there’s nothing to sell and neither there is actual date given for availability. When the terminal some day silently hits the shops, in the worst case there already is a new flagship model to steal the marketing momentum. Who wants to spend hundreds of euros for an "outdated" device you cannot upgrade? For example N97 was launched back in December and many models have been launched after that - when will all these devices be available? Give us the exact date and make noise about that, these devices are not made for engineers but for customers to buy. Why people have to play detectives to get the information when they can buy these terminals? Is marketing department awake?

//Harri

3 comments:

Tzer2 said...

Your use of the number of Nokia models is very deceptive.

All the other figures you give are for smartphones, so the implication is that Nokia has 78 smartphone models, but the 78 you mention is made up mostly of non-smart phones.

Also, a lot of the models listed on Nokia.fi are actually discontinued, for example the N81 is no longer available in Finnish shops yet it is still listed as a "current" phone on the website.

Really you ought to only look at Nokia's S60 devices available on sale, which would probably be about 10 to 20 models. That's more than Apple, but it's about the same as Samsung, and Nokia is much more similar to Samsung in terms of a target audience.

On top of that many different phone models are actually very similar internally, hence the early N86 8MP models which were labelled N85 8MP.

Harri Salminen said...

Thanks for commenting my post. What you write about the information available at Nokia's site kind of confirms my claim: Nokia's marketing efforts aren't really up to date. It seems to be consumer's responsibility to know what is available and when, instead of beind able to rely on stuff that Nokia publishes.

//Harri

lopez said...

if smart phone sales decreased -16,8%, does that mean it increased 16,8% ?