Blog 2 - Downfall of Nokia in India

I remember just a few years ago everyone in my family and friends owned Nokia phones. I did not even know about other brands. Nokia had around 40% of the market share then. It is very difficult to believe that Nokia went from being the leader to practically being non-existent in just a few years. When I look back, I can see several strategic mistakes that were made by Nokia.

According to me the downfall of Nokia happened mainly because of the iPhone in the US. But in India, it was a different case. Not many jumped from Nokia to iPhone. Most people jumped from Nokia to android phones, mostly Samsung. There were several reasons people made this switch.

Nokia had its own closed source operating system - Symbian Operating system. Whereas most other phone manufacturers had android OS - an open-source OS. Since it was open source and used by many, it was frequently updated, and the updates were done collaboratively. Whereas Nokia had to develop its own operating system without any support. This resulted in Symbian based Nokia phones being not very user friendly compared to android. Anyone who I remember used android based phones never went to Nokia.

Moreover, Nokia did not have good apps. If I remember correctly, many apps that were provided by Nokia were paid. Nokia also did not allow developers to create apps for Nokia easily. So, there was less competition among apps in Nokia and the quality was naturally not as good as android ones. Thus, there were more apps in Android-based devices and the quality of these apps was higher too. This also resulted in the users never going back to Nokia once they used android based phones.

According to me, one of the big mistakes that could have been avoided by Nokia is that they tried to develop vertically. They wanted to have control over the development of the hardware, the operating system, and the apps that run on the phones. Whereas, other android based phone companies did not have to concentrate much on the development of the android operating system. Neither did they have to concentrate much on the apps that the device will support. Thus, they mainly had to concentrate only on the hardware and integrating it with android. I believe this led to unfair competition among android based phones and Nokia and resulted in Nokia’s downfall.