By Payam Dastmalchi on August 12th, 2009
Nokia as a Media Company
There is a fascinating 11 page article by Mark Borden about Nokia in the latest issue of FastCompany magazine. Nokia’s EVP Tero Ojanpera is on the cover of the magazine and the article focuses on Nokia’s plans moving forward and the way they want to challenge what Ojanpera calls “that fruit company in Cupertino”. I strongly suggest that you read the article yourself but here are some interesting points:
- in 2008, Nokia sold 472 million cell phones and generated $70 billion in revenue, earning $7 billion in profits. They make 13 phones every second and are the 88th-largest company in the world with 1.1billion customers. Their market share is greater that its next three competitors combined but that those numbers are slowly being challenged.
- Nokia CEO Kallasvuo believes that its all numbers and scale game when it comes to app stores and Nokia will win that scale game.
- The company believes people adopt to new technologies because of three reasons : 1)survival, 2)social and 3)entertainment. Nokia refers to these as culture.
- Nokia’s R&D labs are working on a new technology that senses what a user is doing at any moment and then select music from a personal library to suit that activity.
- The article also mentions the legendary musician Dave Stewart. Dave is not an official employee but his title is change agent and acts as Nokia’s ambassador to the entertainment world.
- Stewart was trying to persuade U2 to release the bands recent album through Ovi but it never happened.
- Nokia’s Dance Fabulous game starring a singer named Cindy Gomez is the result of of Nokia’s plans of bridging music and gaming. The songs from the game are sold via Nokia’s Online Music store.
- Nokia’s CEO refers to the company as a “content provider that is deeply involved in media, music, gaming and navigation”.
Again, this is an interesting article and made me appreciate what Nokia has done to mobile industry. We always talk about how Apple is kicking Nokia’s behind but as the article suggests there are two sides to each story and Nokia might be the only company that can scale and make a comeback as a media company.
