Tomi T Ahonen is about as authoratitive an industry analyst as you can get and has written a lengthy but all-encompassing analysis of the smartphone world going into 2010. Where will the fortunes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, RIM and others lie? Read Tomi's session with his crystal ball to find out!
Read on in the full article.
wow, a smartphone war! dont u think technology is moving a little fast..
really good article.
it also tell the truth about iphone number
really unbiased.
"Analyst" with Finnish name... obviously a Nokia tool.
> "Analyst" with Finnish name... obviously a Nokia tool.
Not true. I'm also an industry analyst (how much do YOU know about the industry, really?) and know Tomi personally. He is one of the world's very leading experts on all things mobile, and REALLY knows his stuff - he is respected across the planet in the mobile industry. He is an expert expert, and when he speaks, people should listen, and if you're going to disagree that's fine, but have some pretty solid facts and figures to back up your assertions.
Quite interesting, but why does he keep saying Nokia own Symbian?
Industry analysis that shows up as a free blog should give people an indication about its depth.
For example, here is an excerpt from Mobile Industry News about the positive iPhone launch:
"The iPhone is expected to pose a challenge to Samsung and LG, which dominate the market for mobile phones in South Korea and also make smartphones. They are also major players globally in mobile phones, ranking No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, behind Finland's Nokia Corp."
Look familiar? Perhaps I should become an industry analyst too.
I don't mind reading Nokia fan service, because I'm a Nokia fan, but please don't suggest it is otherwise.
Unregistered wrote:"Analyst" with Finnish name... obviously a Nokia tool.
Instead of being a tool yourself, I suggest you read the article to the end where you will find your suspicions are addressed.
It's a thorough analysis and I think he's right about RIM, but I think it is overly optimistic on Nokia and pessimistic on Apple. Apple seeks to dominate the profitable segments of the markets in which it competes, and thus it probably never expects its market share to exceed what it has right now. Historically they have been reluctant to support the enterprise market, but with iPhone's and Snow Leopard's support of Exchange, that may be changing. iPhone is a bit long in the tooth, but the 4G should give them an opportunity not only to bring out a new carrier in their largest market, but also to work well with the tablet everyone expects them to release later this month. They have a very loyal customer base.
Nokia is hanging on to its market share, but it seems that Symbian is becoming a feature phone OS rather than a smartphone OS. In reality, "feature phones" don't really exist in many markets. Nokia succeeds because it has great manufacturing prowess and huge economies of scale. They could probably do the same using any OS. However, they are losing the high end of the market. Just because they appeal to the masses in India and China looking for actual $40-$100 phones doesn't mean they will find loyal customers willing to buy their products when they graduate to more expensive models. At the same time, RIM's inroads in Europe threaten their enterprise market base in Europe.
Also, I think Ahonen underestimates the US market. It is only 7% of the total market, but his own analysis indicates that smartphone penetration is only 17% compared to 43% in Europe. That means it is a growth market for smartphones. Nokia really has nothing to offer right now, as Symbian is virtually non-existent there. If the US market is so irrelevant, why have Nokia execs insisted for the past three years that they want to turn things around there? To do so, they may need to be creative and treat it as a different market. Why not make an Android phone running the same hardware that they use for the rest of the world? Port QT over to it, and then they have a coherent software strategy (once Symbian and Maemo have moved over to QT) and can still sell their own-branded services such as Ovi Maps on the "Nokia Droid". HTC has been successful juggling WinMo and now Android. Why not Nokia with Symbian to occupy the low-end, and Android and Maemo the higher-end?
There's both a smartphone and a platform war going on at the same time, and I suspect that the platform war will influence the smartphone war quite a lot, at least in terms of attracting developers.
1) iPhone and iPod touch are both running on the iPhone OS platform, iPhone is a phone and iPod touch is essentially a PDA. A lot of apps (including the very popular game category) run on both. Both devices are reasonably evenly matched in sales figures (60% iPhone, 40% iPod touch), and iPod touches are a lot cheaper than iPhones. This makes iPhone OS to developers a lot more attractive than just the sales figures of the smartphone side of the family suggests.
2) Android is also a platform that supports both smartphones and other devices, including netbooks and eBook readers. This will also make Android more attractive to developers. One major Android downside at this time is fragmentation, which makes it more a family of related platforms than a single platform, not unlike the S60/S80/S90/UIQ split we saw at Symbian (and which was one of the major issues for developers with Symbian).
3) Qt/Standard C++ could become a major platform if done right. Not only can you support Symbian^4 and Maemo 6 with one source, but also desktop systems and much more importantly, netbooks and othe Linux-powered portable devices. However, the signs are that Qt for Maemo 6 will not even be source compatible, and the noises coming from Symbian about Orbit are not good either. Which is a pity, because Qt as a unifying API for both Symbian and Maemo is IMHO good for both, Maemo can profit from Symbian's bigger installed base, and Symbian will still have a super-high-end device range which is compatible at the source code level.
I'm completely agree with Tomi (the author).
Maybe because I don't live in the USA that I know that iPhone really struggling to sell their devices. In Indonesia iPhone only manage to sell less than 20,000 unit through bundling with Telkomsel. The price is 2.999.999 rupiah (US$310). It is very cheap, considering that Telkomsel never subsidize bundling when selling Nokia phone here. But in Indonesia touch screen is NOT what we want. We don't care how good the eye candy were. We want QWERTY keyboard, Dual/Triple SIM. If any of you know Indonesian in the web, ask him how many cellular number he/she had, and how many cellular number his husband / her wife had.
iPhone also struggling in China because unlike american that do care about gimmick, the chinese do care more about practical use. The chinese don't care if the UI can flip/flop. What it matters is for US$200 subsidize the competitor have better camera, replaceable battery, etc. In Tomi article he said that early adopter were a geek, I must said that USA really have a lot of geek, and iPhone really know American a lot, but it fail to create the buzz outside USA.
I've been to China more than all my finger in my body combined together, and I've bought a cell phone in China once. One of the most important factor in there is replaceable battery. Most phone manufacture there sell a phone with 2 battery. Even motorola does that. If it's battery is not replaceable, then it would be very hard to sell the device.
iPhone will be seeing a hard time in the coming years, all the competitor coming right into the touch screen device and getting better and better, whereas apple refusal to make more than 1 model will make it can't fight the shrinking market. 2010 will be a very rocky road for iphone.
davidmaxwaterma wrote:Quite interesting, but why does he keep saying Nokia own Symbian?
You're right, Tomi seems a bit confused on this.
Nokia bought Symbian the company and they merged at the end of Jan 2009. Nokia kept most of the staff, [*] but a few of the staff and custody of the OS moved to the open source Symbian Foundation.
Nokia have a very big influence on where Symbian OS is going, through the all the Nokia & ex-Symbian engineers it now has, the number of Symbian OS devices it ships and its ownership of QT. But that is not the same as ownership of the OS.
Footnote:
* - Some ex-Symbian left through Nokia's downsizing "voluntary resignation" and redundancy programmes later in the year - as did some existing Nokia staff.
Ahonen makes some very good and realistic points here, but i think it's not complete. Like that Nokia has about 270 customers to struggle with (global operators) and Apple just a few (AT&T, T-Mobile). However, it never can be complete as things are changing by the day. Look what happened to Motorola last week, a smack in the face from Google and rumours at CES already say that Moto wants to join Symbian again when SF^4 is there. Can't blame them.
I also agree with svdwal (Nokia should realy fix the issue of non-unifying API's) but that's from a developer perspective. And that does not effect sales that much. IMO, the OS itself will never be a sales argument, only to a very small % of users. Like us that read articles like this 😉. That leaves 95% of potential users that want a smart or feature phone that is cheap, reliable, and has Internet access. Aka a pocket communicator that acts as a phone and gets data as and when needed. It should run for days on one charge. This is what Nokia/Symbian/Sony Ericsson/China ?? (Ahonen missed that) is preparing where others focus on fashion, geek stuff. For this Nokia will have Maemo. Money is made on volume, not on gadgets, you can't rely on their success for years. So i wonder what's happening with the gadget suppliers when Symbian has finished the transition, and the OS is free and true open. Build gadgets on Symbian ? I think i would 😉
I think GM's demise offers some lessons for Nokia that I'm not sure Tomi Ahonen's analysis quite appreciates. It is true that reports of Nokia's demise are greatly exaggerated. However, in some respects Nokia of 2010 is resembling the GM of the 1990s. GM didn't die quickly. Rather, it was a slow death. They became too big for their own good, and stopped being nimble. At the same time, they had enough cash cows and existing platforms to keep them going. Just as Nokia still has just under 40% of the market by virtue of their established European and emerging market base, GM had their large home base and natural markets (fleets, car rental companies, governments).
GM, too, always had promising projects waiting in the wings. They pioneered electric cars, OnStar, flexible fuel vehicles, and even airbags and ABS. However, like Nokia, they sat on their own innovations while others exploited theirs.
Small cars (GM) and touchscreens (Nokia) are the good analogy here. Similarly, GM dismissed its competition for too long. They rationalized that the Japanese would fade away once Americans got over the econobox fad in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Americans did get over the fad, but the Japanese were ready with mid-sized cars. GM missed the whole minivan craze until it was too late (to be fair, so did the Japanese, but in this case they gave a market to Chrysler and later Ford). Nokia missed the flip phone craze, and got caught out by the exploding popularity of touchscreens after the iPhone's release. Complete newcomers like Google got decent touchscreen OSes out faster than Nokia. Similarly, relative newcomers like Hyundai, Toyota, and Honda responded more quickly to changing car buyer tastes. GM also lost profitable niches like luxury cars to companies like BMW, and later Toyota and Honda, who successfully launched luxury brands in GM's home market.
When GM did stumble upon a hit (the SUV craze), they made a lot of money, but fell into the trap of thinking it would last forever, and neglected the rest of their product line. I worry Nokia is falling into the same trap with Symbian.
GM also botched some big acquisitions (EDS comes to mind, as does SAAB). While the jury is still out on Nokia's acquisition of Navteq, Nokia Maps continues to underwhelm, and Google may be shaking up the market with their free offering. Nokia appears to have correctly figured that phones would replace dedicated GPS devices, but Google may have figured out the best delivery model.
By no means is it certain or even probable at this point that Nokia will follow GM's path to oblivion, but the company needs to consider that possibility and react to it.
Unregisterd wrote:
I also agree with svdwal (Nokia should realy fix the issue of non-unifying API's) but that's from a developer perspective. And that does not effect sales that much. IMO, the OS itself will never be a sales argument, only to a very small % of users.
1) Symbian OS sells 3 times as many phones as iPhone OS, but for each app I sell, I make 4 times as much money on iPhone OS than on Symbian OS (this because operator billing takes away all that money). If conversion rates are identical, I will make more money on Apple OS. Where do I go to?
2) All other things being equal, I can make twice as many apps on iPhone OS than on Symbian OS per year. Which platform will I choose?
3) Symbian OS sells mainly into countries where people have less disposable income compared to iPhone OS. That means lower prices in those countries. If the price is halved, you need two times as many sales for the same net revenue.
From these examples it should be clear that the biggest volume is in itself not enough to attract developers. The entiere mix must be right, and that includes sales volume, ease of development, commission percentages, conversion rates and lots and lots of other things.
I'm not sure I can agree with the KPO'M GM analogy, because it seems so Americentric.
GM have had since the 1950s a huge European subsidiary, OPEL, where much of their innovation actually comes from. They have long been doing small car Kadett/Astra Corsa, etc. Europe is such a different car market, with sharper handling and diesel being greater requirements of the european driver. Opel are GMs more successful part of the euro car market. Contrary to what happened in the USA, the SUV has always been a non-success from GM in Europe. They have always been stronger in the compact sector. It's true that GM were slow off the mark with diesel compared to native euro car makers like VW, but I think again that was because of the American influence.
Nokia have always been primarily euro based, with strong performance in Asia. Only more recently did they start R&D activities in the creative part of the USA (California).
Analysis is worth what I paid for it.
The guy bills himself as a "motivational speaker" but the only thing I was motivated to do after trying to read this was find a Paracetomol. A repetitive and rambling style is not evidence of a clear mind. How exactly do you stab somebody openly in the back?? That's a new one to me.
At least there's one language he is fluent in:
Tomi is also the father of several widely referenced industry concepts and theories, including the Hockey Sticks theory, Connected Age concept, Generation-C for Community, and the 7th Mass Media taxonomy, each of which has also already been referenced in books by other industry thought-leaders.
svdwal wrote:That's true of course, but as a developer I don't care about the OS itself but about the amount of money I make. Some examples with made up numbers:
You are absolutely right on this and i can't agree more. Same issues here 😉
But the article is about smartphone market, not, unfortunely, ours, eg. developers 😉 But to continue this twist, I'm pretty sure that a consumer does not buy a phone because of one App in particular. But a decision can be made on Apps as seen on a friends (i) phone. And how easy it is to get this. Most iPhone apps are bought in a reflex (no, not yours, and not ours. That's why we're still in here). Most (iPhone apps) have low prices and a known revenue to us. It's about volume on iPhone. That's the problem in OVI. There's none yet, only in theory. And also in theory we should make the same 70%. In your dreams. Can be even less then 40%, while it is harder to code (but we can do more) , and lots more efforts are needed to put it on OVI anyway. Lots more (listen Nokia: LOTS more!. Because there are seperate groups inside Nokia: one is responsible for sales on hardware, and another one does Apps. They should meet each other 😉)
We all know OVI will be updated, and the iPhone had good effect on Apps, even on Symbian Apps. It created awareness to users. But also to Developers that things can be done so more easy.
But thats not what's the article about. Commenting is easy, solutions will come in time.
Hi all here at the All About Symbian blog
Thank you for referencing my blog and thank you all here for the many comments. If you visited the blog early on, it now has also over 20 comments and I will be replying to everyone who posts a comment at the blog.
I wanted to just stop by here to say hello, to thank you all for the good discussion. I am an ex Nokia guy yes, was employed by Nokia and left the company in 2001 to start my own consultancy. I say so in the blog story itself. Also I have provided consultancy to Nokia since then who acknowledge that support in public, and so do four other handset makers in that list, Motorola. RIM, SonyEricsson and LG. Just because I have been employed by one company or provided consultnacy to it, does not guarantee that they get 'favorable' treatment by me, as you can see, I was positive of RIM and LG, negative of Motorola and SonyEricsson; and was both positive and negative about Nokia.
About me being an analyst - I think is a fair comment, I provide analysis for free on my blog regularly on the industry and you can trace my commentary back for many years. It may be intersting to read for example what I blogged about the launch of the iPhone - I recall here at All About Symbian my blogs back then were also seen as valuable contributions to the understanding of what role the then-newest phone maker would bring to the industry. I was proven mostly correct in my predictions, which were very detailed and deep at the time haha.. But yes, after writing 6 bestselling hardcover books for the mobile industry, and another 3 e-books, I think its fair to say I am an analyst of at least reasonable credibility haha..
About that GM analogy here, its a relevant one and I certainly would urge Espoo Nokia HQ ot think about it every so often. Similarly what happened for example to IBM once the world's biggest computer maker etc. I would argue that currently Nokia is not showing any relevant symptoms of any 'GM disease'. GM looked at the world market and refused that its own market would change to be more like the world. Rather than emulate Toyota, which was regularly eating up GM's global market share - GM did not try to become Toyota, but rather pursued opposite direction, developing the SUV types of ultra-expensive ultra gas-guzzling cars that primarly only Americans would buy, and even then, be left with severe damage to the desirability of those vehicles the next oil crisis would come along as we saw a few years ago as the prelude to this current crisis at GM. Nokia has been monitoring carefully the moves of its biggest rivals - correctly determined that the Razr was not going to take over the world - Motorola's brief fling with a return battle (and Nokia did increase its flip/fold/twist/slider form factor phones at the time). And now monitoring Samsung in particular but also LG. And remember, in the big picture, smartphones are not the main battle for world phones, so Nokia should not obsess about the iPhone. Before the iPhone was announced, Nokia had already set up its consumer smartphones unit (N Series) and this was the reasonable unit to take on the iPhone. Not all of Nokia. What of Ovi, advertising, mapping, ultra-cheap phones etc - Nokia has many irons in many fires and is not really 'worse than second best' on most fields, including business phones (E Series) second only to RIM.
It does not mean that Nokia should be complacent. It does not mean that they have executed everything perfectly; certainly they have made their series of blunders. I think the most ironic right now is the demise of the N-Gage. Apple's biggest amount of paid apps are games, and arguably the iPhone is the newest version of a gaming phones (N-Gage). And there are always some rumors that SonyEricsson will one day release a PSP phone. But the original gaming smartphone, N-Gage, was allowed to die. Why didn't Nokia do a total upgrade of N-Gage and make it a credible gaming rival to the iPhone? Coulda been a fascinating battle. Now Nokia doesn't really have a gaming platform at all, while the mobile gaming industry is second only to music (including ringing tones) in the total mobile data content side that runs some 70 billion dollars in value in 2009 and nears 100 billion this year....
Thank you all for great comments and please do also stop by at my blog to post comments there to continue the dialogue.
Tomi Ahonen 😊
www.tomiahonen.com
. Nokia has been monitoring carefully the moves of its biggest rivals ..
Maybe that's the problem. Nokia missed the rise of touch completely, is this because Apple wasn't a rival?
It is now three years since iPhone was released and Nokia has not made Symbian competitive, it has lost a great asset.
But you're not going to make your reference customer angry and say that, are you Tommi?