Nokia: To Ship Over 20 New Phone Products In 1H '02
GOTHENBURG, Sweden -- Finland's Nokia Corp. (NOK) plans to ship more than 20 new mobile phone products in the first half of 2002, the head of its mobile phone unit said Tuesday.
"We will ship more than 20 new products during the first half of this year," Matti Alahuhta, president of Nokia Mobile Phones told the Comdex Nordic conference in Gothenburg.
A Nokia spokeswoman declined to elaborate on whether Alahuhta's comments included both phones and other accessories.
A Nokia official said in November last year that the company planned to introduce more than 20 new handsets and phones during the whole of 2002.
Company Web site: nokia.com
-By Buster Kantrow, Dow Jones Newswires; +46 8 545 13090; buster.kantrow@dowjones.com
Nokia, the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones, has been criticized by some for failing to introduce new models that would take advantage of networks that allow users to swap messages and download information more quickly and easily. It began selling its first such GPRS model late last year, after competitors such as Motorola Inc. (MOT) and Telefon AB LM Ericsson (ERICY).
But Alahuhta promised that models with new bells and whistles were on the way. "Our business is not a race about technology," he said. "It is about who knows the consumer best."
Nokia is expected to introduce several new phone models at key industry events early this year, such as the GSM World Congress in February and the CEBIT technology fair in March.
Monday, it formally announced the creation of a subsidiary, Vertu Ltd., that will sell luxury mobile phones priced as high as EUR24,000 apiece.
Alahuhta said Tuesday that Nokia firmly believes that multimedia messaging, which allows phone users to trade pictures together with text messages, will be the next big thing in the mobile industry.
"I can say that my colleagues and I at Nokia have not been as excited about a new technology since the transition from analogue to digital" network technology in the early 1990s, he said.
Nokia has said it plans to begin shipping its first model with a built-in digital camera, the Nokia 7650, in the second quarter of 2002. Alahuhta predicted that sales of mobile phones with built-in cameras will surpass sales of digital cameras worldwide within "a few years."
Tuesday, Alahuhta challenged the suggestion - as Nokia executives have in the past - that mobile phones are becoming commodity products with little to differentiate them. The suggestion is often made to support the argument that Nokia will find it difficult in coming years to maintain its phone unit's high profit margins.
Alahuhta, though, said as the technology in phones becomes more sophisticated, the number of different styles and functions will grow as phones are designed to satisfy separate groups of customers.
"The differences will be more real, not less," he said.
Alahuhta said Tuesday that several major information-technology companies have signed on to the effort, launched by Nokia and 18 other mobile telecoms operators and suppliers late last year, to support an open platform for the development of new mobile services. The IT companies include International Business Machines (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), Hewlett-Packard (HWP) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW), he said.
Nokia is due to report its fourth-quarter financial results Thursday. |
