'Youngsters drive Nokia's growth in emerging markets'

What are the challenges you face to provide mobile connectivity or network
implementation in the emerging markets?

Huge growth is expected from the emerging markets. Rural markets have a
significant role to play for us. In the rural market, people are expecting good
quality mobile phones with affordable price with voice being the basic feature.
We are addressing this with our entry-level phones. On the infrastructure side,
we need uninterrupted electricity, place to install base station and
distribution of handsets in the rural areas. To address these challenges, Nokia
has developed radio base stations, which can be used in these areas. These do
not require a large space for set-up, or need air-conditioning; these are
self-sustained base stations. At the same time, we use generators for
electricity.

On the distribution front, we have introduced e-refill for prepaid customers,
where a consumer can recharge his account by an SMS. Along with this, we have
local distributors to distribute handsets. For instance, in India, we have HCL
as GSM distributor and Bright Point as CDMA handset distributor.

Where does Nokia stand in the emerging markets?

We do not disclose the market share. However, Nokia has sold over 2 bn
mobile phones globally. From our next billion volumes, 80% volumes are expected
mainly from these emerging markets by 2008.

What are the trends you see in the urban areas of the emerging markets?

We did a consumer study in 16 countries to find out the expectations of the
consumers. According to the study, urbanites are looking at mobile phones for
mobile data. In order to enable this, we have launched 3G-based mobile phones.
It is not that we restrict 3G mobile phones only for urbanites. We are also
launching these products in rural parts.

What are the different charac-teristics of these emerging mar-kets?

Some of the Asian countries such as India, China, Indonesia, Vietnam and
Bangladesh and countries in Middle East and Africa constitute the emerging
markets. We see a huge population in the age group of 15 to 25 that are going
mobile and driving the growth. In some of these countries, regulation or
government policies have to be changed.

What is your roadmap for India?

India is a very important market for us. Now managed services are being
handled out of India. For the mobile market in India we have rolled out e-refill
and prepaid tracker for prepaid users. Pre-paid tracker provides details like
validity, balance, details such as cost of the last call and duration, last
top-up, etc on the mobile screen directly from the networks. One can keep these
details on the mobile screen or he/she can hide it.

Apart from this, we are looking at offering managed services and speedy roll
out of services for our customers. For instance, instead of racks we offer
modular structure for network equipments to save around 70% cost.

Srinivas R 

vadmail@cybermedia.co.in