Android Is Killing Nokia In China And European Markets

As we all know that while Nokia used to at the top of their game as having shipped the most handsets, and while they are still at the top, it looks like Apple is slowly catching up in terms of handsets shipped, but iOS and Android devices are starting to take over the smartphone market these days, probably why Nokia has decided to change their strategy and work with Microsoft in producing Windows Phone 7 devices in hopes of recapturing the market, but for now it looks like no thanks to Android’s success, in the China and European markets it looks like Nokia is fighting a losing battle.

As it relates to competitive challenges, it is the case that certain competitive forces, particularly Android, are really gaining momentum in certain regions. For example in China, there’s an indication of some very substantial movement in the growth of market share for Android, particularly in some technology areas where Nokia today with our current portfolio doesn’t compete.

A good example of this is the CDMA technology in China, where that technology has seen quite an increase in market share in China. And as you know, we don’t currently have CDMA products, but clearly, that’s something that we’d be considering in the future. So there’s some dynamics like that that we have to deal with.

In Europe, that’s not the case on the management perspective. It’s very much about competitive pressures. We’re seeing, for example, a large volume of Android devices really coming into the market. They’re largely undifferentiated from one another, which is putting pricing pressure thereupon, which in turn affects the overall ranging decisions of the operators; so there’s definitely pricing pressure going on.

Perhaps all of that will change when they come out with their WP7 devices. Nokia seems to be putting all their eggs into Microsoft’s basket but with WP7’s Mango update getting positive reactions, perhaps there is still a chance for Nokia to rebound, after all Nokia has made some pretty decent handsets in the past, it’s just that in terms of platforms they were a bit slow to catch up.