mobile competitors from the computer world on Wednesday, but said the
Finnish phone company is set to respond to all challengers.
Nokia
president and chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said emerging rivals
Apple, Google, RIM and Microsoft have helped to accelerate interest in
using the internet on mobile phones.
"Suddenly, you
have the mightiest companies in the world there as your competitors.
That is a little mind-boggling," Kallasvuo said in an on-stage
interview at the Churchill Club, a speakers' forum for Silicon Valley
civic leaders.
Nokia sells more than 400 million
phones a year and has a 40 percent share of the conventional, global
mobile-phone market, where it competes with Samsung, Motorola, LG and
Sony Ericsson, among others.
Kallasvuo said he was
impressed by the strategy of BlackBerry maker RIM, which is not just
selling devices themselves but complete packages for managing corporate
email securely.
"Multiply what RIM has been doing here," the Nokia executive said of his own company's strategy to provide email not only to business users but also consumers, as well as a category of avid users in between the two markets, sometimes referred to as 'prosumers'.
Nokia recently struck a deal to use Microsoft email software
on its more than 80 million Series 60 phones sold so far. Kallasvuo
said the deal should help Nokia quickly overtake RIM in terms of the
numbers of phones running corporate email.
"We will
exceed the RIM client in some months with a very good email system,"
Kallasvuo promised. RIM recently reported it had 19 million BlackBerry
subscribers.
Kallasvuo singled out the positive
impact that Apple has made on the industry with its iPhone over the
past year, saying the Cupertino-based company has done the mobile-phone
industry "a big favour".
"We have a new, credible competitor in
this business. You know I need to take my hat off," he said of how the
iPhone has raised expectations for phones. He added: "Of course, we
need to be able to respond to any competitor and we will."
Of
Google, the Nokia executive said it was too early to tell what impact
the web company might have on the mobile-phone business: "They are a
newcomer here. I think the jury is still out: what is the new thing
they bring here?"
Thinking back to nearly a year ago,
when Google first announced Android, Kallasvuo said Nokia had been
working towards similar goals for a far longer time. "I realised that
we could have made the same announcement 10 years ago," he said.
The first Android phone was introduced last month by T-Mobile in the US, to be followed shortly by several T-Mobile markets in Europe.
Europe
helped propel the global rise of mobile communications in the 1990s but
Silicon Valley created and continues to dominate the internet,
Kallasvuo said. As the internet moves onto phones, the US is poised
once again to lead that convergence, the leader of the Finnish company
said.
From : http://news.zdnet.co.uk/
