The success of Nokia-branded smartphones and feature phones will be forecast by India, according to HMD Global’s Chief Product Officer Juho Sarvikas. The company’s senior executive said that India is not only one of the firm’s key markets, but also a “proof of concept” that HMD Global hopes will foretell its future prospects in other markets around the world. While speaking at a Monday press event held in New Delhi, Sarvikas revealed that the Espoo, Finland-based phone maker is still in the process of identifying key markets on which it intends to focus in the future, but regardless, India will certainly be one of the highlights of the company’s new product strategy.
India is an attractive market for Nokia and almost every other original equipment manufacturer (OEM) due to a number of reasons. While many developed handset markets have been showing signs of saturation for years now, the demand for smartphones in India is still showing no signs of slowing down. According to recent reports, Indian consumers will purchase up to 130 million smartphones over the course of 2017, which is a sizeable market that most major phone vendors in the world deem worth fighting for. Furthermore, being a developing country, India still sees strong demand for feature phones, a market segment that Nokia is in a unique position to service due to the popularity of its brand. Given that state of affairs, the company is hoping that its recently launched Nokia 3310 (2017) will perform well in India, as well as a number of other markets, many of which are already developed countries.
Other than India, HMD Global is currently also analyzing China and trying to determine its chances of winning a significant market share in the Far Eastern country, Sarvikas suggested, implying that the recent launch of the Nokia 6 in China was part of the company’s experimental run in the country. Finally, HMD Global’s senior executive reflected on recent rumors about a 4G-enabled variant of the Nokia 3310 (2017) that the company previously dismissed. While reiterating that such a device won’t be launching in the coming months, Sarvikas didn’t rule out the possibility of HMD Global releasing it in the future.