Nokia shows Apple how to do mobile phones after monster 2007

By Stan Beer
Saturday, 26 January 2008 06:36

Opinion and Analysis

While new mobile phones entrant Apple struggles to to achieve its goal of moving 10 million iPhone handsets by the end of 2008, the 2007 results of mobile phone leader Nokia has put into perspective the market that Apple is now playing in. Nokia, which commands a 38% share of the global cellphones space, sold a staggering 437 million handsets in 2007 with revenues of more than $75 billion.

The final quarter of 2007 proved to be the most spectacular of all, with Nokia selling 133.5 million phones, 27% more than Q4 2006, and racking up revenues of more than $23 billion, a 40% increase over the corresponding quarter in 2006.

The comparison between Nokia and Apple of course is not really valid, since Apple in the mobile phones space is really only a single product niche player in the high end smartphone market. However, looking at Nokia's high-end multimedia phones that compete in the same market as the iPhone, Nokia shipped well over 11 million Nokia N-series devices and over 2 million Nokia E-series devices during the fourth quarter 2007.

If we further narrow Nokia's product sales to just the N95 handset, the product that some pundits like to compare to the iPhone, then the sales numbers even up somewhat. According to telecoms analyst Ovum, Nokia has shipped 6 million N95 handsets since it came on the European, Asian and Middle Eastern markets on 22 March 2007, while Apple has shipped 4 million iPhones since it was released to the US market on June 29 2007.
However, the N95 is considerably higher priced than the iPhone and was the number one profit generator for Nokia in Q4, while there are earlier N-series products, such as the N73 which is still selling well, and fast selling new products such as the N81 and N82 that also present alternatives to the iPhone.

Looking at Nokia's dominance in the mobile phones space paints a picture of a company that is now as big, according to Ovum, as all its major rivals Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG added together.

Major reasons for Nokia's dominance of an industry that is tipped to ship 1.25 billion handsets in 2008 are its global reach and its vast product range that spans the entry level to the high-end of the market, including the consumer, entertainment and business sectors.