After almost 15 years of leadership on the mobile phone market, the Finnish manufacturer Nokia loses this year the first place in the top, being deposed by Samsung and Apple. What happened?
“The battle for the title of largest smartphone maker in the world smart between Nokia, Apple and Samsung is becoming more fierce, especially now in the second half of 2011”, says Neil Mawston, an analyst at the company Market Research Strategy Analytics. Nokia is about to lose supremacy that it had for almost 15 years, which could happen even at the end of June, when Samsung would go first. And then, the Finnish manufacturer will probably lose another place in the ranking, becoming the third largest vendor of smartphones after Apple, according to Nomura Securities brokerage firm analysts. “If Nokia’s new models will not be well received by consumers in the second half of this year, especially considering the offensive of other competitors, Samsung will go first in the world market”, confirms Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner, a market research company.
Nokia had expected to lose ground since a few years ago, but analysts were over time rather reserved in forecasts, even when the company began losing market share to competitors that came quite late in the competition, but attacked the segment that records a big growth now. Finnish manufacturer has remained virtually behind and carried the battle for market changing with wrong arms. Stephen Elop, the new CEO, already looking for solutions to alliances with other players in order to prevent even more to losses.
In August 1996, when it released Communicator, Nokia shaped the smartphone market practice, and the model was for years the emblem of the business worldwide. Primacy has therefore assured a top place to the company in the industry, but it was not enough at the time when the strategy has not been as aggressive as before, but, on the contrary, the manufacturer has ceased to innovate in line with the rest of the market. Since the N series models, with N95 in the forehead, model considered at the time a real spearhead, the company has not released phones that really surprised consumers or, if they did so, they had a pale glow against the new models of devices such as iPhone”. After about 14 years, Nokia seems to give up the crown”, wrote a research article conducted by Nomura Securities analysts.
Change in the top already happened in most European countries. Consumers bought more smartphones in recent months with the Android operating system or iPhones than models signed by Nokia. And the signs are quite visible around the world, thus justifying the analysts’ view that 2011 will mean the sunset of an era driven by giant from Finland. Asian market will probably also be given out next year, mainly to HTC, and also to the smaller local brands that in the last half year doubled the slice owned in the industry.
In the last three months of last year, for example, sales of Nokia smartphones increased by only 36% worldwide, while the models from Apple had an advance of 86%. And not iPhones are the main threat, but models that run on Android operating system, a proof is the explosion in recent years of sales of such phones. Next year, for example, cell phones with Android will represent almost half of world sales of smartphones, up from 38.5% of the market share estimated for this year and 22.7%, as it was in 2010, while models with Symbian will reach only 5% next year from more than half in 2008.
It doesn’t mean that Nokia smartphones will be not be sold anymore, but they will be replaced with models that run on Microsoft’s software platform, as a result of a partnership between the two companies. Thus, if the first models with Windows will be released this year, the Symbian operating system phones will be out of production next year and these model will disappear completely from stores within two years, during which the company is obliged to provide support to terminals.