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Posts: 289 | Thanked: 560 times | Joined on May 2009 @ Tampere, Finland
#108
Originally Posted by BatPenguin View Post
No, the point isn't silly at all. Nokia's average selling price for phones has been dropping all the time and it's a major problem for them. You get a lot more profit from selling the more expensive phones. The N900 doesn't exactly cost 600 euros to manufacture. R&D costs exist for both cheap and expensive phones. Sony Ericssson's CEO has, for example, said that they won't go into the cheap phones anymore since the margins are so small that they couldn't be able to produce them at prices that compete with Nokia, and still make money. This means that Nokia is not exactly raking in money from cheap phones. The expensive phones are where the money is -- and if a phone's selling price is 300 euros, they probably make much more profit on it than they do by selling three 100 euro phones.

The average price of a Nokia phone sold today is down to 62 €. The average price of a Nokia smartphone is now down to 155 €. (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1f67240c-4...44feab49a.html )

These numbers are falling all the time. I won't look up links for this, google it yourself, but the amount of PROFIT Apple makes per iphone is somewhere between 300 - 600 dollars per phone, I seem to recall. This is where Nokia wants to be. So if the magic fairy makes Nokia's 150 € smartphones for free, they only need to sell 2 to get the profit Apple is making.

It's not a silly point. I may have worded it in a not too good manner, but the point is valid: the cheap phone market is Nokia's since not too many of these major companies want to be there at all.
The point isn't silly, but it certainly isn't as simplistic as you make it out to be.

Isn't the SE CEO implying that they want to be there, but just can't compete with Nokia in the low end?

Q1/2010 almost exactly half of Nokia's devices net sales(3,3 of 6,7 B euros) came from phones with an ASP of 39 euros. Margins are smaller than in smartphones, but wouldn't it be disastrous to just drop all that? There's certainly someone to take that market, so why just give it to them? Could they increase sales of smartphones enough to recoup all that? What's holding them back now? If they can't do it now, why could they do it after dropping basic phones?

Why give up the strong presence in the huge developing markets for short term gains instead of offering models in all price ranges for people to move up the ladder in the long term?

They're behind in the high end smartphones right now, but working hard to fix that while making migrating featurephone/dumbphone users to smartphones by pushing Symbian in the lower price ranges. Competition in the high end is getting bloodier by the day, so it may be smarter than people think to not keep all the eggs in the same basket.

The only purpose for Android in Nokia portfolio I can see would be a few NA only smartphones to gain some initial foothold/recognition in the US which is living the smartphone fever right now to eventually transition them to other Nokia platforms. But as mentioned, it'll be a cold day in hell when we'll see an Android device from Nokia. And I personally like that.
 

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