Are Apple and Google (and its partners) really going to push all their competitors into small niches in the market or run them out altogether?
Nokia is scrambling now, there’s no doubt about it. The top mobile-phone maker by volume in the world is finding the competition in the high-end smartphone market a little too much (they’re not alone).
The Finnish company plans to cut operating expenses by $1.5 billion by 2013, according to Forbes. To get there, they’re shifting focus and trimming down to fighting weight.
Nokia’s market share has continued to drop as Apple and Google have taken over. Nokia’s Symbian mobile operating system has dropped from a 40.9% share of the global smartphone market a year ago to 22.1% at the end of last quarter this year, according to the Wall Street Journal. So far this year, Nokia’s stock prices have halved, from around $10 to about $5.
The company’s plan to cut $1.5 billion in operations expenses involves some readjusting of focus that, sadly, reeks of desperation. Well, this one does, anyway…while not giving up on high-end smartphones, the Nokia folks are shifting focus to a low-end feature phone operating system, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Feature phones represented 47% of their sales in the second quarter of this year. It makes sense, but it’s kind of hard to watch, you know? Company head Stephen Elop said in February that they would try to up sales by pushing low-end phones onto the segment of the population that doesn’t have mobile phones. (See what I mean?)
While doing this, Nokia is giving up on the Symbian operating system and going with Windows Phone, according to Forbes. Also, they’re dropping Maemo—a next-generation operating system they were developing with Intel.
And of course the restructuring involves layoffs. Today the company announced another 3,500 job cuts (mostly through the closure of a Romanian manufacturing plant) on top of the 7,000 announced in April, according to Forbes.
Yikes. The only bright spot in this is that Nokia’s dual-SIM phones are supposedly selling well in Asia. Also, their first Windows smartphone should be out at the end of next month (but that’s after everybody has already bought an iPhone 5 next week).
It feels like it’s just gonna be Apple and Google (and its partners, unless they start making their own phones). Like Microsoft and Apple with computer operating systems. But I could be wrong.
