Nokia phones at one time were sold like hot pancakes. Now they are one of the brownies waiting to be bought at the mobile confectionery. Why did this transition happen? How did Nokia lose its appeal?

There are multifarious reasons for it from centre Nokia failing to identify the nerve centre after a certain period, to rivals hitting the bull’s eye when it was the right time.

Nokia for the first time introduced mobiles phones to India before that Indian consumers had not seen any other mobile device. This way Nokia has been the oldest player in the mobile segment yet it is failing. Statistics state that Nokia lost almost 20% market share within a span of 2 years where it was 56.2% in 2008, it fell to 32.9% in 2010. The rate at which Nokia’s share is reducing is alarming.

Clearly, Nokia has lost charm, when vendors were busy producing smartphones and operating systems Nokia had nothing to offer except for its N series phones, which people already were bored off once smartphones came their way. In the tablets race Nokia is nowhere in the scene whereas Apple and Samsung are way ahead.

But Nokia doesn’t seem to agree and is persistent on the fact that it still leads the CDMA and GSM handset market with a share of 52.2%. Research says otherwise and gives a lower number, but Nokia refutes that too by saying that those numbers do not include certain manufacturing units.

But the industry relies on IDC and Gartner numbers to a great extent so the scales are not in favor of Nokia.

Consumers too are not very Nokia friendly now, brands like Micromax are cheaper and are  therefore taking the limelight away on the lower income user end. On the high income end BlackBerry, Apple, Samsung are dominating the scene.

The reason for the success of the smartphones segment for other brands is also to the credit of Android as the operating system, Nokia in this genre failed terribly. MeeGo and Symbian which Nokia phones work on did not garner any proper interest from consumers.

All these factors combined together as a force are probably leading to the grand Nokia story to end, perhaps not so sweetly.

Shreya Choudhary/ITVoir Network