Mumbai: If there is anything more difficult than getting to the top, it is staying there. As the head of Nokia India and a veteran of the consumer business in India, D Shivakumar is busy keeping the brand's two-thirds market share intact while pursuing new avenues for growth. Shivakumar, managing director and vice president at Nokia India, shares with DNA the strategy and plans of the world's largest mobile-phone maker for its second-largest market. Excerpts from the interview:
What do you do when you are already number one, with a market share many times your nearest competitor's? Is life easier?
Being number one also comes with the responsibility to expand the market. You have to show strong innovation and strong initiatives. You have to look at the future and say, 'this is where the future will be and this is how we have to plan for it.'
Second point is, anytime a market leader goes into the market to defend something, he always loses it. The best leaders are those who say I will attack the market. Leaders or champions never win when they defend, they always lose, because that is not what they are used to and made them big. They became big because they invested ahead of the market, they took risks and they went after it. You have to keep figuring out new adjacencies, new form-factors, new services, and new ways of creating value. We constantly need to be very very fast, attack the market.
What does it mean, in concrete terms, for Nokia? What is the new challenge you have set up for yourself?
Our challenge is to go beyond devices. We want to move from devices into solutions. As long as consumers were just making calls with their phones, it was okay to be a device manufacturer. But now, the consumer wants to do much more than that and we want to evolve along with our consumers' demands.
We define a solution as a combination of devices, services and accessories. So, we plan to launch a series of services over the next six months that will take us from being just a hardware vendor to a services player.
Services such as?
A week ago, we announced the launch of the N-Gage application where users can browse through a large collection of games, try them out and purchase them if they like. So, from the provider of a gaming device or phone, we are also adding a platform for the discovery and purchase of a wide variety of games.
Similarly, next quarter, we will be launching an online music store for subscribers in India with a choice of lakhs of songs that consumers of our music phones will be able to download for free for a year.
In May, we will be launching the Ovi App store which will be a platform for application developers to sell their products directly to consumers. In two months, we will be launching a service called Nokia Life Tools whose target will be to educate, inform and entertain those who are on the other side of the digital divide. In addition, we will also soon launch an integrated messaging solution that will deliver push email, instant messaging etc on a single platform and after that, in the next quarter, we will also launch a free photosharing platform under the Ovi brand.
It sounds like a huge diversificationfrom your core business. Why do you think you would be successful as a service provider if you enter the business now?
As a company, we have always transformed ourselves according to the opportunity. About 145 years ago, we started out as a pulp manufacturing company. We have been a rubber manufacturing company, made consumer electronics and also been a cable manufacturer in the past. Today, we believe we are on the cusp of another transformation, selling devices alone is not enough.
What makes you think you can take on established players such as Google, Facebook and displace their products? Why will consumers prefer a new service when they are already using Facebook photosharing or Gmail on their handsets?
There are two issues here. First is convenience. It is true that you can upload pictures to Facebook at the flick of a button from our handsets. You can read Gmail on your phone even now. But our strength is that as a mobile phone manufacturer, we can offer something even more seamless. Our messaging application, for example, will allow you to collect emails from 16 accounts, your existing instant messaging accounts etc.
Besides the advantage that we have as a manufacturer, there is a little confusion about who we are targeting. Our target is not necessarily the 50 million or so Indians who use internet on their PCs. The Indian market is not like the western market, where people have moved from internet to mobility. They were already using internet on the PC before they started using it on their mobile phones.
But in India, there are 50 million people who use the internet on their PC out of a population of more than a billion. In comparison, there are more than 350 million mobile subscribers in India and we will add around 200 million more in two years. The rural telecom penetration is just 12%. Therefore, we are not targeting the 50 million people who are currently using Facebook or Gmail on their PCs. We are targeting the people for whom the mobile is their first and perhaps their only screen (for accessing the Internet).
How has the economic slowdown affected the market?
The economic growth is there, but the biggest dampener on consumer spending is employment uncertainty. People are unsure about keeping their jobs. It is a big dampener. The challenge is to innovate and give something so compelling in such a market so that the consumer is willing to forget the downturn. It is not possible to categorise the impact to product categories, though I do not expect the downturn to affect the entry-level market and we will still add around 100 million subscribers this year. This is also helped by the fact that there is so much heated up activity because of the entry of new players.


