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Posts: 87 | Thanked: 88 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Beijing
#24
Originally Posted by hasselmm View Post
Oh, you greatly overestimate the importance of China when it comes to luxary goods like smart phones. Let's play some numbers.

Yes, there are 1.3 billion people. But, about 80% of them are shockingly poor landworkers.

So we have to focus on the 266 million people in the coast regions. Most of them are underpaid factory workers, still way too poor to effort a 600 EUR device. So it really are quite few people in China who can effort a N900. China's potential smart phone market, is significantly smaller than EU or USA. Probably it's even smaller than the market of single European countries like Germany (80 million people) or even Netherlands (20 million people).

Now add the poor copyright situation in China and you should stand up and applaude Nokia for not following the flock and burning money on that largely overestimated market. I really prefer Nokia standing arround for a while instead of wasting money in China.

Right now China is a good market for cheaper phones, but it's definitely not a market for IP loaded, luxary devices like smart phones yet. No return of investment for decades yet.
The current market trends in China are moving rapidly towards upmarket devices, we see the same thing in india (also strangely missing from Nokias N900 launch) where people spend a larger amount of their paychecks on cellphones than would be conceivable in the west. ROI will be positive very fast, we are definitely not talking about decades here. 2 million iPhones were sold before the iPhone was launched here (grey-market devices not copied btw), largely because Apple did not provide the Chinese market with a legal marketing channel to purchase the device (for instance they paid more for these devices than people did in say the UK).

The Chinese high-end consumers read on western media and are very aware about what the newest technology is, it's just not possible to launch a product two years later here anymore.

Couple this with the still expanding economy and middle class and Nokia should definitely try to build any advantage that they can here.