Nokia in the last decade, where are they now?

To most things in life, the rule of survival of the fittest applies to make competition and adaptation possible among people and even animals. Like Charles Darwin said, the strongest animal is not the one that survives, but the one that can adapt to changes better.

Obviously the best lab to verify this claim is in the tech world where the competition is very high and consumers’ needs change after a period of time.

Nokia is a giant in the mobile phone world but less of a giant than it used to be. What possibly caused it? It was not only at the advent of the smartphones that Nokia started having problems but rather before then.

In 2003, Nokia came late to the flip phone party and it started losing its market share after it dominated that mobile phone category since 1990s. Nokia started having a declining market share after companies like Samsung and LG introduced flip phones into the market.

Nokia’s market share fell from about 38% in 2003 to 30% in the third quarter of 2004 according to IDC because consumers started migrating to flip phones.

The then CEO Ollila admitted to this fact: “Our timing was not right. There was a six- to nine- month period when we didn’t have the midrange and clamshell phones that consumers wanted.”

Nokia survived this but the biggest challenge Nokia is now having started about 4 years ago after smartphone makers began innovating to improve the features of smartphones. Nokia started earlier on as a leader in this category with its Symbian operating system which is almost non-existent today.

In 2009, Nokia had 38.9% of the smartphone market with its Symbian OS while Blackberry was second with a 19.8% of the market. Apple was third with 14.4% while HTC was fourth with 4.6% of the market. The market leader today, Samsung, was at a distant 3.3% 4 years ago.

Likewise Android operating system was the sixth most popular with a 3.9% share of the market in 2009.

Nokia has since moved its smartphones to the Windows Phone platform and they’ll be there for a long time because Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone business. With a 38.9% in the smartphone market in 2009, where is Nokia today?

The last quarter results released by Gartner revealed that Samsung now leads the smartphone market with a 32.1% share of the market while Apple came second with 12.1% of the market share and Nokia was classed among others because it didn’t even make the top 5 of the smartphone category.

Android OS now dominate the market with an 81.9% share of the market. Apple’s iOS is second with a 12.1% share while Microsoft’s Windows Phone is distant third with 3.6% of the market and that could give us an insight of where Nokia may be since it’s the major smartphone maker on Windows Phone.

Although it must be noted that Nokia is still the second biggest mobile phone maker behind Samsung when you consider the sales of feature phones, but, the feature phone market is shrinking while the smartphone market is widening.

If there is a place to establish dominance at the moment, it is the smartphone market. Unfortunately, this is where Nokia is struggling.

Microsoft has now taken over Nokia so, only time will tell if Nokia will still be rejuvenated unlike Blackberry which is almost destined for extinction.

If we must judge Nokia by Darwin’s views, then we will say Nokia was very strong but rather too rigid to adapt to the changing needs of its consumers.

Posted in Microsoft, Nokia, Smartphones