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Nokia wants new CEO: Report
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arbitrabbit
2010-07-20 , 20:36
Posts: 171 | Thanked: 114 times | Joined on Feb 2010
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I think the CEO should go. While there is no doubt that 2008 was good for Nokia, given the dominant position that Nokia came from and then conceding the highly lucrative smart phone market (gross Margins c.45% vs lower end phones where margins are c.5%) to the likes of Apple (somewhat unavoidable), HTC, Samsung etc. (completely avoidable) was a big strategic blunder. Nokia came from and to a certain extent is still stuck in hardware is king mindset, similar to IBM of early 80s, whereas increasingly the smartphone market is moving to the concept that hardware is commodity and software is king.
I had to make such changes in a previous life where I had to completely change the business model of a company and had to reduce the headcount of the company from over 200 employees, most of whom were hardware technicians to c. 35, most of them software devs. It was painful but it was what ensured the survival of the company in the end. Unfortunately Nokia is in a similar position today and it is less the quality of their hardware and more the quality of their software and post sale support, which is abysmal at present, that would determine the company's future.
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