There was a time when Nokia phones reigned over the phone market. Now that Nokia has been pushed at the fifth spot in the feature phone market, it plans to change its operations by making phone components in India.
Since India is currently a hot plate in technology growth, making components there would help HMD Global, the Finnish company behind the iconic Nokia phones, reduce overall cost. The news came out when a top executive at the HMD Global emphasized on the matter.
While it may not have been successful in other parts of the world, but Nokia has shown itself to be a powerful entity at least in India. This is because India still has a large customer base for feature phones, whose people aren’t acquainted with smartphone usage. The figures also support this statement as Nokia sold nearly 70 million devices all across the globe, and its business grew nearly 5 times in just 8 months alone but in India.
As Counterpoint Research points out, Nokia had a six percent share in the feature phone market in India claiming the fifth spot. It has been 4 months since then, and surely the share would have been improved more, leading Nokia to make this decision.
According to Ajey Mehta who happens to be the Vice President and Country Head-India, HMD Global, “We are following the phased manufacturing programme. In line with this, we have started having conversations with our partner Foxconn to manufacture our own components in the country.” In an interview to IANS, he further stated that “It will happen over a period of time. We may be a little behind, but it will eventually happen and the components that attract import duty will be manufactured here.”
As usually, governments do, they try to improve domestic production as compared to foreign. Therefore, India did the same by imposing a 10 percent import duty on vital components like camera module or the PCB. (The motherboard). Therefore, by producing these components in India itself, Nokia would save on the import duty and could then further reduce the price of their phones. It is expected that the company shall be working with Foxconn on this, and take their assistance in setting up surface-mount technologies.
If you don’t know what that is, then it is just a way of producing electronic circuits in which the components are mounted or placed directly on to the surface of printed circuit boards.
“It will take some time, but we will do that for sure,” Mehta commented.
Not only is the company interested in the feature phone market but is also slowly capturing a part of the smartphone one. This has been shown by the recently launched Nokia Sirocco 8. Furthermore, there were two other handsets as well: The Nokia 6 and Nokia 7 Plus. The good thing is that Nokia realized what they were doing wrong, and switched to Android as their primary OS.
As per Nokia’s top executive, the Nokia 8 Sirocco is their best movie yet. Not only is the phone made out of steel but it comprises of 95 percent glass. Furthermore, in a compact design, you get a performance-packed device. This is what makes people at Nokia confident about it.
He further stated that eventually they to be a full-range player. They know that feature phones are still a huge market. Therefore, they shall continue to invest in feature phones and refresh some of them over intervals.