Nokia aims for big bounce from fall

As the global smartphone war heats up with the release of new handsets, Nokia looks to make a turnaround and gain an edge in the competitive marketplace.

The mobile maker Nokia has been restructuring its global executive team to allow for speedier and more localised decision-making. Toru Yamanaka / AFP
Powered by automated translation

In the fiercely competitive smartphone sector, many executives candidly avoid addressing their company's shortfalls.

Then there's Tom Farrell, who as vice president of Nokia Middle East helps to run a company whose grip on the mobile market has famously weakened in recent years.

"Our backs are to the wall, so it's time to come out fighting," says Mr Farrell, who is based in Dubai.

"What I think happened was we slowed down," he says. "We got complacent, and we got too big and bureaucratic."

In this year's second quarter, Nokia had global sales of only 23.9 million smartphones running on its Symbian software, as its market share in this corner of the market shrank from 41 per cent to just 22 per cent compared with the same time last year, according to the research company Gartner.

But while Nokia has been phasing out mobiles using its own software, it has teamed up with Microsoft, which is providing the latest version of the Windows Phone mobile software - called Mango - on new Nokia models.

"We're not the first big company to have great success and then suffer and, now, a turnaround," says Mr Farrell. "That's where we are. We're at the turnaround."

Yet, trying to orchestrate a turnaround in the mobile market is a tricky affair. One day a handset is hot, the next day it's not. Research In Motion's BlackBerry and LG's smartphones have suffered sinking sales after lacklustre product releases. BlackBerry's decline has been compounded by a service blackout last month. And Google is hoping to reinvent Motorola Mobility after agreeing to spend US$12.5 billion (Dh45.91bn) this year to acquire its assets.

The companies are starting by reintroducing an Android-based version of the Razr, Motorola's famously thin phone that once boasted stellar sales, then famously flopped and disappeared from store shelves.

For Nokia, there are some signs that it is steering towards a recovery, although it still has "a huge amount of work to do", Mr Farrell acknowledges. While its profit fell yet again in the latest quarter, the drop was smaller than analysts expected amid strong sales of simpler models of Nokia mobiles.

Ringing the changes:Discover what the UAE telecoms have planned

Etisalat Learn more

Du Learn more

Its new N9 smartphone, which functions with swipes of a finger and leaves out a traditional "home" button, recently launched in the Middle East. Expectations for strong sales are high in this part of the world, and a full-on Arabic-language version is to be released within weeks.

The company also recently announced new handset models in Europe that will eventually make their way to retailers in the Emirates, but only after Microsoft's software starts displaying Arabic.

"In the past, I think we would have compromised," Mr Farrell says. "We would have launched anyway."

"The old days of just spray every product everywhere - those days are gone," he says.

In recent months, Nokia has also been restructuring its global executive team to allow for more decision-making at a local level.

The goal is to create "more speed and responsiveness to local markets", Mr Farrell says.

"Nokia traditionally is a very centralised company: do it once, scale everywhere," he says. "We realised fundamentally [that smartphone] ecosystems are local: there's local content, local consumers, local apps, local partners. That's the irony of globalisation."

Although there is plenty of work ahead, Mr Farrell is trying to savour small bites of success as new Nokia smartphones launch in the Emirates.

During lunch at a restaurant in Dubai Internet City, two men from a nearby table came over and asked whether the smartphone nearest Mr Farrell was Nokia's new N9. It was.

"To be honest," Mr Farrell says, "it's been a while since I sat in public and someone came over to my table and said, 'Oh is that the … ?'"

twitter: Follow and share our breaking business news. Follow us