GLOBAL – CEO Stephen Elop discussed Nokia’s 4th quarter results with media and investors today. Stephen touched on a number of topics including Nokia’s strengths, Ovi successes, developers, and the future of the company.
On Nokia’s strengths:
Nokia is a brand that defines mobility in many regions of the world, and is still strong today. We’ve shipped 5 million of our new Symbian devices in the fourth quarter, which sends a strong signal about our customer base.
[…] we will advance our great software and services assets, which benefit hundreds of millions of our consumers across all market segments. This includes location-based services, localized services like Life Tools in emerging markets and the Ovi Store, which ramped to 4 million downloads per day.
On Ovi:
Our data also shows that these devices are driving more people to use our Ovi services, and at a greater frequency. In fact, a study by iResearch looked at application store traffic in China. The study ranked our Ovi Store as the leader.
On developers:
We have a healthy base of developers across the globe, developing globally- and locally-relevant apps. We support operator billing with more than 100 operators, and we now have more than 30,000 apps in the Ovi Store. We are now seeing meaningful growth in developer activity, supported by the improved user experience on our new devices, as well as continuous improvements of our Ovi services platform.
On location:
We have received positive feedback from consumers for our latest offering, and we have truly global scale, spanning over 180 countries and regions, with 100 of them navigable. Our NAVTEQ asset is a unique and critical building block.
On the Nokia C3:
In the low-to-mid-range, the attractively-priced Nokia C3 QWERTY device continued to see strong demand in Q4, and was one of the top contributors to our overall revenues and gross profits. We estimate that we have the leadership position in global QWERTY volumes, driven primarily by the C3, which also contributed to solid uptake of our messaging service.
On the future:
The game has changed from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems. […] The emergence of ecosystems represents the broad convergence of the mobility, computing and services industries.
[…] At the same time, we see a different type of ecosystem building around mid-range-to-low-end devices in developing markets involving very low-cost components and manufacturing processes. In this range, brand, scale, price, design, distribution and speed are critical.
[…] we must believe that our strategy simultaneously increases our success in markets where we are strong, while re-opening doors in markets where we are weak.
And finally:
Suffice it to say, that my first few months at Nokia have been remarkably illuminating, and remarkably busy. We look forward to sharing the next step in our journey with all of you on February 11th.