14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Nokia plans to expand S60 on Symbian OS to new market areas and new categories, while also trying to bring the platform to lower-cost devices, at least this is what CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and CFO Rick Simonson stated at the company's recent Q4 earnings conference call.
According to the two, the Finnish mobile phone maker plans to further expand the S60 investments compared to Series 40. They also stated that Nokia's five services (Ovi) combined with a wider offering of devices are able to change the meaning of smartphone.
“Some of our smartphones delivered different global volumes than we expected, we are confident that our portfolio is headed in the right direction.” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said. He also stated that the company did not believe that smartphones were only high-end devices, and pointed towards Nokia 5800 and Nokia N97. According to him, Nokia would be capable of leveraging “our scale, trusted brand, global reach and consumer understanding, as we bring Internet services to a number of attractive price points. And that is what you will see from Nokia in 2009.”
When talking about the aforementioned expansion, Kallasvuo explained that “expansion is not just in price points but also in different categories and consumer segments. Though of course we can do S60 at lower price points. The software cost is not prohibitive; it is a tremendous opportunity to increase efficiency and scale and gain share.” He did not give any details on the timings, but stated that the company already made “investment and research and development” for this strategy and that the results were expected to appear this year.
Rick Simonson, Nokia CFO, also said that the company would focus on expanding the idea of smartphone, and gave as example the Nokia 5800. He added that “by combing our five services with a larger portfolio of devices... we think that, by the end of 2009, you can look at the smartphone in a new and enhanced way.” According to him, “devices from a hardware point of view is not enough anymore,” while “the strategy of adding services on top of the hardware will change the definition of the smartphone.”
When asked about the performance of Comes with Music, Kallasvuo stated that “it has gotten a good start, but we need to expand the hardware portfolio and market availability. The plan is, in the near future, to do thirteen more countries and seven or more new devices.”