In this final video in the series of ‘futurist conversations’ between myself and Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency, we discuss the future of Nokia as a keyhole on where the mobile phone market is going.
Here are a few of the points we make in the conversation:
* Nokia did not have the foresight to take critical steps including adopting touch screens, easy-to-use software, and making their phones fully-fledged Internet-enabled computers.
* Nokia until recently dominated almost every emerging market and some developed markets, yet is completely dropping Symbian, the platform that its customers know.
* The key question is whether Nokia can successfully make the transition to Windows Phone.
* Its strength is in low-end systems, so it is a major challenge to reposition globally around a high-end platform.
* In countries such as Indonesia, India, or Nigeria Nokia has completely dominated the market.
* Over the next year or so hundreds of millions of Nokia users in developing countries will shift to feature phones. This will be a make or break for Nokia on retaining existing customers in that transition.
* Efficient Chinese phone manufacturers are enthusiastically adopting Android to create well-featured low-cost phones.
* Apple is very likely to launch a low-cost phone, given that they are now able to do that while adhering to their standards, which is a challenge, however the bigger threat to Nokia is Android.
* Nokia has reinvented itself numerous times during its history, and may be able to do it again.
* It needs to seek to disrupt existing markets rather than take market share.
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