Nokia To Sell Phones For Rs 100 Weekly Instalment

[savramesh 37]

Source

NEW DELHI: Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, now wants to be a global leader in new technologies by offering software and solutions to its 1.5 billion handset users across the world, the Finnish firm’s global CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said here on Wednesday.

Software and solutions will be the next frontier as customers now look for more than a handset, said Mr Kallasvuo who is touring India to chair the jury for The Economic Times Awards for Corporate Excellence.

“We are investing heavily in services such as navigation, music, media, messaging and internet on mobiles. None of our competitors have articulated such an entry into the solutions market,” he said.

He said Nokia is “taking a keen look” at netbooks — small, light portable computers used for accessing internet that have become immensely popular — but did not confirm if the company will start making them.

Mr Kallasvuo said Indians are rapidly lapping up Nokia’s new applications. India is among the top five countries in terms of downloads from Ovi Store, Nokia’s online software and content store, launched in May 2009 in response to the success of Apple Inc’s App Store.

Nokia will soon launch a new scheme, ‘Comes With Music’, where customers buying handsets could avail of unlimited music downloads for a year on their mobiles as well as computers.

He said it was wrong to perceive India as a low-end cellular market: “Our high-end handsets are selling nicely here. Smartphones are showing rapid growth.”

The company will start selling handsets to poor customers on weekly instalment of Rs 100 each running for more than 25 weeks in 12 new states. This follows the success of the pilot projects in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

“We will partner with microfinance companies for this. The pilots were done in the rural areas of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka across 2,500 villages and it received a heartwarming response of over 27,500 applications,” Mr Kallasvuo said.

Nokia executives dismissed fears that poor monsoons would result in consumers spending less on handsets. At present, rural consumption is the primary growth driver for low and mid-segment handsets.

“We don’t think the market will slow down for mobility in rural India. In fact, people will use their phones more as they cut down on travel,” said Nokia India’s managing director D Sivakumar.

Nokia executives also said that a study carried out by the handset maker jointly with the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has revealed that the communication sector would emerge as the single-largest sector of India’s economy, with a 15.4% share (equivalent to Rs 865,031 crore) of GDP by 2014-15.

India is the second-largest market for Nokia in both sales and volumes after China and it is the only country where the Finnish company has close to 60% market share.

India, which currently has close to 430 million mobile users, is also the fastest-growing communications market in the world with over 12 million new users every month.

Nokia started off as a paper company and then ventured into making cars, bicycles, tires, footwear, cables, televisions, consumer electronics, PCs, generators, TVs plastics, aluminium and chemicals before entering the mobile phone space.

[Sadikk 301]

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