As regard the two giants phone makers – Nokia ( NYSE: NOK) and Research In Motion (RIM) market situations. Indeed, they are facing difficult situation in the world of smartphone presently, are Android phones and Apple’s iPhones responsible for this smartphone market’s misfortune to these phone giants? Well may be.
For instance, Nokia has been seen as an icon to Finland – country with population of about 5+ millions. Perhaps Nokia (NYSE: NOK) is the largest contributor to gross domestic product (GDP) of Finnish people, until recently the world leading phone maker is being disliked from its homeland, why? According to some reports, Nokia is currently building a new manufacturing plant in Vietnam and that means thousands of job loss in its 2 centers in Finland. So pathetic to the Finns.
Nokia Market Situation
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Nokia posted a £320million loss – the day after main rival Apple unveiled record quarterly profits. Revenue fell seven percent to £8.2billion from £8.8billion last year. In contrast, Apple announced net income of £4.51billion for the quarter 125 percent higher than a year ago. It overtook Nokia in the smartphone sector – selling 20million iPhones compared with its rivals’ 16.7million smartphones.
Nokia shipped 88.5million mobile devices between April and June, down from 111million a year ago and 108.5million in the previous quarter.
According to Nokia Chief Executive, Stephen Elop said: “the challenges we are facing during our strategic transformation manifested in a greater than expected way during the quarter. However, I believe our actions to mitigate the impact of these challenges have started to have a positive impact on the underlying health of our business.
RIM’s Blackberry Market Situation
The Canadian based smartphone manufacturer – Research in Motion (RIM) is planning to shed its workforce globally by 11%, which means 2,000 jobs cut. According to reports:
Job losses were a prudent and necessary step for RIM’s long-term health, but that has not factored the cost of redundancy pay-offs into its forecasts for the current financial year. It will give details of the financial impact of the cuts when it reports in September.
RIM’s share price slumped 4.32% to $26.73 last week trading in New York. RIM has performed well in the past because of business demand for its handsets, such as the Blackberry Curve, which are quick to use for email and more secure than other models. According to some analysts, viewed “ Blackberry has struggled to broaden their appeal to the general consumers, who tend to prioritize touch-screen functionality over security. It has done well in the enterprise market because it’s very secure and easy to manage, but most people don’t simply care about that”
With Apple gearing up to launch new iPhone perhaps a mini –iphone, an affordable price for the larger percentage of developing and emerging markets. May be towards the last quarter of this year 2011, Apple may strike another blow to Nokia and RIM and Google’s Android platform smartphones. Should they all concede defeat to Apple as the new market leader of smartphone to emerge soon? What do you think?