IT

Nokia’s goal: To connect the next billion

Jayasri Jayakody reporting from Dhaka

“Asha - coming from Hindi - meaning ‘hope’ signifies Nokia’s focus on positive user experiences and connecting millions of people to new opportunities that help them reach their aspirations” said Nokia Bangladesh’s Country Manager, Abu Daud Khan speaking to Daily News at the Nokia South Asia launch of the Asha range of feature phones at the Hotel Westin, Dhaka, Bangladesh on Saturday he also said, “Nokia’s goal is to connect the next billion.

Our overall objective is to get web connected phones into the hands of another billion people who so far have gone without and mobile application can enable them to access more information that will add value to their lives”. Nokia has been leading the way to drive mobile application usage and to empower the people by connecting them with the wonderful world of Internet.

Through the Nokia online store, Nokia provides free unlimited download benefits to the consumers with thousands of applications that are available. With local and customized apps like ‘Weather Now’, ‘Stock Assist’ and ‘Scoreboard’ and over 2.5 million downloads per month, Nokia Bangladesh ranks among the top 30 globally. Nokia Asha blurs the line between smartphones and feature phones.

As owning a smart phone is costly, but now with Nokia Asha devices the consumers can get a smarter mobile experience, close to smart phone experience, because Nokia Asha range devices will have the access to thousands of application via Nokia store, for free. This will enable the device to be more efficient and will drive a unique user experience.

Nokia continues its mission to deliver high quality, stylish devices that provide the best access to social networks, the Internet and information, and offer the best overall experience and value proposition.

These consumers want access to innovations such as easy-to-use dual-SIM, local services and content and third-party apps, all with a superior user experience for which Nokia mobile phones are known.

Nokia does not only provide apps to smart phone devices but also provide for its Internet enabled feature phones.

“Nokia has a much more reach in apps when it comes to feature phones and over the last six months in the emerging markets there was a weekly average of 0.8 million downloads in applications. 0.5 million came from Bangladesh, 0.2 million from Sri Lanka and 0.1 million from Nepal.

These downloads were mainly coming from low end to mid-range Internet enabled feature phones of Nokia,” Ahmed said.

Nokia is facing rigorous competition to maintain its long dominance because of the increased threat from Chinese and Indian manufacturers of low priced feature phones, and has also lost its market share considerably in 2009/2010 in the South Asian region.

“Competition is not only with the branded phones. We cannot match the price of Chinese and Indian phones. But people are increasingly getting more quality conscious and producing low cost Internet enabled phones will enable us to differentiate from the low quality phone manufacturers,” Ahmed said.

“Nokia will be concentrating on both segments of the market with more focus on smart phones. Sri Lanka is a highly prospective market as the country’s per capita income is very high compared to other countries in the region and the literacy level is high.

As the Sri Lankan consumer is very quality conscious there is still a high demand for Nokia feature phones. We hope to market our smart phones aggressively and to also be the leader in the Smart phone segment in Sri Lanka,” he said.