It’s not always easy to take a beating in your hometown, ask Blackberry. Nokia’s been there but now they seem to be back on their toes. Samsung is both global smartphones and all handsets sales leader. That’s not the hard part.
Nokia suffered a beating both globally and in the home country of Finland as it transitioned from a ‘burning platform’ to everything new, the Windows based Lumia and the Series 40 based Asha phones. Well the Asha even gets more advanced at the entry level.
IDC new figures show that Nokia finally managed to seal this gap and get a 36% market-share in Finland passing Samsung which now stands at 34% as highlighted by itviikko (Finnish). This was in the second quarter of 2013, the April to June period that shows Nokia is slowly gaining form. The Lumia 520 is doing quite good sales for the Finnish company.
In the three months period, Nokia sold 210,000 phones compared to Samsung which sold 200,000 mobile handsets. This was split between 106,000 smartphones from Nokia, 164,000 from Samsung and a feature phone split of 104,000 for Nokia and 36,000 by Samsung.
This goes to show that Nokia feature phone strategy continues to get the mobile manufacturer some market-share, the same strategy that had them at the top in the first place in the past. Apple was a distant third with 41,000 devices sold in the market, a drop from 14% to 7% in the country.
Nokia positions the feature phone as the entry level device and the new Asha platform as the bridge between the Series 40 based feature phones and Lumia smartphones which have not succeeded in crossing the sub $150 mark. The cheapest Lumia is the Lumia 520 at $182 (Kshs 16,000) compared to Android devices which go as low as $60.
This is solely the biggest nightmare that Nokia has as the functionality of the low cost Android device by far beats what they offer with Series 40 based Asha phones. Asha platform seeks to get this difference as minimal as possible and even hoping to give a better experience as there has been no indicator that Windows is going any cheaper due to the OS constraints.
Innovation continues.
