20 August 2009

Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo
We Are Eyeing Entering The Laptop Business

With the market for converged devices growing, the world's largest cell phone maker, Nokia, on Wednesday said it is exploring various opportunities and is preparing to go head-to-head against personal computer makers in the fast-growing laptop market!

"....the PC and the mobile will continue to come closer and merge," Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said at a press conference in New Dehli. "A lot of opportunity can be seen in this converged area. We at Nokia is actively looking at this converged market.. . ..We are looking at the netbook market to see what kind of opportunity is there."

Industry has rumoured about Nokia's plans to enter the PC industry since late last year, but this Kallasvuo's comment is actually the first official admittance of such plans. Of course, Nokia is nervous about entering a market segment that is already heavily commoditized, but from other hand, Finnish cell phone giant would be in a position to exploit its enormous user base, scale in manufacturing, supply chain and distribution.

A lot of companies that naturally make laptops, corporations like Apple, HP, Acer and Dell have come up with their own high-end mobile devices and moved from the computer business into Nokia's core operating system business, so there is a certain logic in Nokia's move to computer business.

However, if Nokia comes up with its own netbook, it would be kind of a reverse trend, because till now, the market has only seen that personal computer and notebook makers come up with handsets and not the other way.

As a matter of fact, with the processing power, onboard memory and broadband access that Smartphones today possess they have entered the day when they are more like the personal computers and basically, Nokia is already in the personal computer business if you ask me.

All leading mobile network operators and retailers are adding connected notebooks and netbooks to their portfolios alongside mobile phones. On this basis it comes as no surprise that Nokia is evaluating this segment.