Asia-pacific accounts for 22% of net sales of Nokia as of Q4 2008 and EUR 3719 is the revenue Nokia generated from India in the year 2008. Already a market leader in mobile phones, Nokia has it all sketched out to grab a lions share of an expected market of 750 million mobile phones in India by 2012.
On the 3G front Nokia is gearing up with a slew of news services like music online and location based services to be made available on it’s new phones, which are to be launched shortly, especially nokia’s new flagship device N97.
“We are moving away from just devices to devices plus services plus solutions. With the 3G mobile services set to make advent by the middle of the next year, we feel that revenue from non-voice services is bound to increase significantly,” said D Shivakumar, vice-president and general manager, Nokia India Ltd as quoted on business-standard.
Eyeing the huge potential of non-voice services Nokia has already released it’s online store Ovi and now the company is hoping to see some great consumer applications for it’s facebook phone N97 through the company’s developer programme. Nokia’s developer programme took off really well since it’s launch featuring some great applications, zook is one of the apps from India that recently got featured on Nokia.
Lately we have seen mobile subscribers growing despite the recession and growth largely contributed by rural markets. India has 450 million people living below the poverty and people don’t own a house nor have a bank account but do own a cell phone and that obviously means a growing Rural mobile VAS market and it’s an obvious move from nokia to try get leverage from Rural mobile VAS.
Nokia is reportedly trying to break into the rural markets by taking the help of micro finance institutions in the country. For a start it has tied up with SKS microfinance, which has 653 branches across 15 States. Apart from the MFI tieups Nokia is also launching Nokia Life tools, which it describes as “a range of agriculture, education and entertainment services designed especially for the consumers in small towns and rural areas of the emerging markets.” Life tools agirculture service will provide information on seeds, fertilisers and market prices over mobile phone besides providing other information. Life Tools already piloted in India is expected to be rolled out by June.
Nokia is also betting on mobile payment services,it has already made an investment of $70 million in a mobile payment system called Obopay. Obopay is a service that lets people transfer money to another between bank accounts with their mobile app or an sms for free in India.
Apart from these strategic moves from Nokia, I really want to see IBM’s new innovation “talk to web technology” implemented on nokia phones. HSTP, probably one of the two greatest innovations in Rural VAS space could strike a great synergy with Nokia the largest mobile platform in the country.
