I dont think that this was very bright on Ollila's part....the ministries have a lot of sway with the mobile phone providers. I assume that Nokia would like to have part of the W-CDMA infrastructure contracts as well as eventually sell handsets in Korea.
chosun.com
Finnish CEO Spars with Minister Yang
During his recent trip to Korea, CEO Jorma Ollila of Finland's Nokia was found to have been involved in light verbal sparring with Korea's Minister for Information and Technology Yang Seung-taik. The tete-a-tete was over the technical performance of various mobile telecommunications services of the two countries.
Ollila has become something of a legendary figure internationally as he turned around Nokia from its near-bankruptcy status at around the end of the 1980s to the largest global cellular-set manufacturer. Nokia occupies 35 percent of the global market.
Minister Yang, himself an expert in engineering with a doctorate in the field, is one of the Korean technocrats who helped Korea's development of CDMA technology, thereby helping the technology take root in Korea.
The verbal exchange took place on Tuesday in a luncheon honoring the visit to Korea by Finnish President Tarja Halonen. Ollila, representing the business sector of the Scandinavian country, shared a seat at the head table with the Finnish president and her husband, Minister Yang and Chair Kim Jae-chul of Korea International Trade Association.
When the luncheon was drawing to a close, Ollila was known to have said to Minister Yang that the speed of wireless Internet service by Korea-made mobile handsets does not measure up to market expectations. Nokia's chief said that Korean handsets have been offering only about 20 Kbps, far below the standard data transmission speed for such gadgets of 144 Kbps.
In response, Minister Yang took out his own handset and retorted, "I've been using my handset to go as far as downloading MP3 files and I haven't experienced any problems with the speed yet."
President Halonen, in what seemed like an attempt to calm down the intense dialogue, jumped in and, pointing at Minister's Yang's miniature-sized folder-type mobile set, asked the Nokia chief why such small mobile handsets are not marketed in Finland. Ollila answered that Koreans and the Finnish have different tastes.
The Nokia chair rounded up his three-day trip to Korea by going back to Finland in his private airplane Wednesday morning.
(Kim Ki-hong, darma90@chosun.com) |
