Who Killed Nokia?

Despite being an exemplar of strategic agility, the fearful emotional climate prevailing at Nokia during the rise of the iPhone froze coordination between top and middle managers terrified of losing status and resources from management. The company was wounded before the battle began.

Failure of Symbian OS and Wrong Deal with Windows

Nokia launched its Symbian 60 series in year 2002 which initially had a good market response but with the introduction of Apple iOS in 2007 and Android in 2008, the OS race was completely taken over by the two giants. The reasons for collapse of Symbian OS is lack of applications and UI (User Interface).

Lumia series could have been a hit for the company had they launched on the Android platform. All these phones which the company launched were comparable to other competitor devices but OS was the problem which lead to ultimate collapse of company.

Losing Market Share on Both Ends.

Nokia not only failed to realize competition from Apple, Samsung, Sony, Blackberry in high end smartphones, they also failed to notice the stiff competition in the lower segments of phones. Where Nokia was loosing charm in high end phones, the competition from Micromax, HTC, Huawei and ZTE squeezed the company’s market share in lower segment too. This led to double trouble for the company. The company which used to have epic models like Nokia 1100 suddenly started losing at lower ends too. Very lately company realized this thing and launched their Asha series but by that time they had already lost the game.

NOKIA Became Laggard in Smartphone Market

Stiff competition from Samsung and Apple, and lack on focus on innovation was the second big reason of collapse. Even if users could ignore the OS, the hardware features which Nokia was rolling out were quiet late as compared its major competitors Samsung and Apple. Nokia seemed to be lagging in the race. Where Samsung from nowhere entered the race and focused on innovation as its core competence to gain the market share, Nokia was very late to realize this fact. Samsung did everything right to focus solely on product innovation and started competing with Apple in all product lines from smartphones to tablets, but Nokia failed to develop a focused device strategy. Just because once you did well do not mean that you will be successful throughout your lifetime. If you don’t change on time, then you are forced to change.