Emerging Nokia Case Study
JANUARY 3, 2012
Defining the Nature of the Problem
The nature of global markets has been rapidly changing in the last twenty – twenty five years. These changes to a great degree have been determined by the major breakthroughs in the geopolitical makeup of the world. One of the pivotal events that fueled the economic changes around the globe was the collapse of the communist bloc in the beginning of the 1990s and consequently the dismantling of the bi-polar world order that had been previously characterized not only by two antagonistic ideologies, but also by two incompatible and mostly isolated from each other marketplaces.
The description of that old world order was often referred to as “the free and the communist world”, “the West and the East”, which later morphed into” developed and developing” countries. As the pure and acute ideological division of the world has moved to the fringes of the global agenda, leaving the front stage of the world community focus to the global economic, ecologic and broader humanitarian challenges, the new world paradigm has been more and more often referred to as “developed and emerging economies”.
The playing out of these new global realities is very vividly represented by the nature of the challenges and the business decisions required of the executives of the world-renown engineering and telecommunications giant – Nokia, which is mostly known to the world for its leading role in the mobile phone handsets industry.
From mid- 1990s and to the present time Nokia has attained and maintained its status of the world leading mobile phone manufacturer. According to ABI Research in 2008 Nokia had close to 40% of the worldwide mobile phone market share, with its closest rival Samsung having only about 16% of the market.[i] This success was attributed initially to bringing to the market easy-to-use mobile