Nokia

Two and a half years into Apple’s iTune Music Store dominating the global market, Nokia is finally challenging its status quo. This day saw Nokia Music Store opening its door to music lovers in Australia – the eighth media store after Britain, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Finland, Netherlands and Singapore. The Nokia Music Store contains millions of tracks from both global and local artists and users will be able to download songs to their computer supported by Windows XP or Vistas PC and transfer them to their mobile phones be it Nokia or other brands. Songs can also be downloaded directly to specific Nokia mobiles such as the N81 and N827. More importantly, the service allows users to download unlimited number of tracks with a $10 monthly subscription fee. Apart from the music store, other innovation initiatives by Nokia include three new phones to be launched in the third Quarter of 2008 in Asia – the Nokia 6600 fold, 6600 slide, and 3600 slide. These phones come with facial contours, tap-sensitive response, and background noise cancellation. Other features include an integrated Maps application which holds more than 15 million points of interest, autofocus camera, and the ability to connect to television sets. Nokia has also launched a series of high-end fashionable mobile phones under Vertu and L'Amour label that come with sapphire crystals, polished ceramics keypads, gold and stainless steel housings, and diamond and leather ascents to cater to the fashion-conscious consumers.
Nokia faces intense competition in the market. Besides the mobile phone companies – LG Electronics, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson; competitors also include electronics suppliers such as Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Palm, Research In Motion (RIM) and Sony. The most recent and greatest challenge especially in America is the launch of iPhone by Apple. iPhone with its user friendly and smooth interface features has encouraged more users to access its mobile entertainment content than many other phones, as according to Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg "There's absolutely strong interest in the notion of the phone being a media and entertainment-centric device. It's just that a lot of the efforts to date have not been very good from the hardware side, software side, services side and pricing or business model side.
While sales and earnings particularly from the emerging markets such as India, China and Indonesia have gone up, the North America business is dropping. “North American market share has plunged from 20% to 7% in the last two years, and part of the reasons is due to the poor relationship Nokia has with the U.S. operators and its lacklustre CDMA handset portfolio in America.