Nokia to make tough calls

SHANGHAI - Nokia Oyj isn't just losing mobile-phone market share to iPhone maker Apple Inc. The Finnish company's dominance in China, the world's largest wireless market, is being eroded as prices sink.

Nokia's second-quarter handset shipments in China fell to 11.3 million, less than half the previous quarter's number and 41 percent less than a year earlier. That, combined with a 30 percent drop in European sales, contributed to a greater-than-estimated 20 percent slump in Nokia's handset sales worldwide.

Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop faces the dilemma of where to focus his resources: Nokia is racing to meet its year-end target of shipping its first phone based on Microsoft Corp's Windows Phone software. At the same time, he needs to halt the decline in China as models based on Google Inc's Android software have fallen below 100 euros ($144) and started cutting into Nokia's lower-end feature-phone sales, said Michael Schroeder, an analyst at FIM Bank.

"They've been a clear market leader for many years, but now it seems that era is coming to an end," said Helsinki-based Schroeder, who has a "hold" recommendation on Nokia shares. "I don't think you lead that market with 11 million devices sold."

At its earnings conference call on Thursday, Elop said he had taken steps to address the build-up of inventory at Chinese resellers that helped trigger a profit warning in May. The inventory overhang could have been as many as 5 million handsets, according to an estimate by Sami Sarkamies, a Helsinki-based analyst at Nordea.

Nokia also replaced managers in China and has named global sales chief Colin Giles as interim head.

"There is softening of demand but the inventory movements were substantial," Elop said. Failing to reverse the sales decline may endanger the CEO's plans to sell 150 million handsets based on Nokia's Symbian software during the transition to Windows Phone.

Nokia's market share in China was 19.1 percent in the first quarter, compared with 23.5 percent a year earlier, according to Gartner Inc estimates. Samsung Electronics Co, the No 2 vendor, had an 8.9 percent share, said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with Gartner's UK-based unit.

Operators such as China Mobile Ltd and China Telecom Corp are playing a bigger role and Nokia needed to "worry about market share" and make "aggressive changes", Elop said on May 31. He had just spent a week in China to look at what changes were needed there to market Windows Phone.

Beijing-based China Mobile had 617 million customers at the end of June, making it the biggest mobile-phone operator by subscribers.

In China, Nokia competes with local manufacturers including ZTE Corp, TCL Corp and Huawei Technologies Co.

"There are dozens of local competitors making feature phones, and also manufacturers of Android devices," Schroeder said. "The cheap Android phones are stepping on the toes of Nokia feature phones."

China has been fertile ground for smaller manufacturers building handsets around chipsets from MediaTek Inc and competing with Nokia on styling and new features such as dual-SIM slots that let users make calls on different networks. In the past quarter, Nokia started selling its first dual-SIM phones in India and Southeast Asia.

Bloomberg News

(China Daily 07/23/2011 page10)