A Story of Competitive Advantage to Competitive Blindness - Nokia – a Strategic Failure?

Nokia

 A story of competitive advantage to competitive blindness

A Report Submitted to

Prof. Shaleen Gopal

In partial fulfillment of the requirements of the course

Strategic Management

By

Group SMC-7

Ashish Vijay (166027)

Himanshu Singh (166053)

Kanishk Pratap Singh (166062)

Section – C

On

26-03-2017[pic 1]

Nokia –A strategic failure?

In the late 1990’s and early 2000, the first thing that came to mind when we heard of mobile phones was the name of Nokia as Nokia had revolutionized the telecom world in such a way that it was deemed as the undisputed market leader for the next two decades and also the biggest phone manufacturer in the world. At that point of time the dominance of the Nokia in the mobile phone industry seemed to be never ending. But once a most profitable mobile manufacturer in the world witnessed an erosion in profit margin and went into loss (See Exhibit 1). Eventually Nokia sold its mobile business to Microsoft. The question we are trying to address here is what went wrong with Nokia-a market leader, which led to its ultimate demise. A story of competitive advantage to competitive blindness.

Approach:

The focus of the report is mainly on mobile business of Nokia in India. Analysis of other business divisions and analysis of business in different geographies of the world is not in the scope of this report. First, we will start with overview of Nokia and its business divisions and try to establish the importance of its mobile business in its overall business. Later on, we will try to reveal the importance of Asia Pacific/India to Nokia. Then we will move Nokia’s leadership in India and the strategies adopted by it. Then we will try to figure out the reasons for decline of Nokia and based upon the points identified after the analysis we intend to do a SWOT analysis of Nokia. Finally, we will conclude our findings.

Note: The reasons given in the report for the vanishing of Nokia from mobile phone industry are not exhaustive. Moreover, they are reasonably true in context of Indian market. Although some of the findings can be generalized across the geographies and their effects on the overall global business of Nokia can be extrapolated to some extent.

 Table of Contents

1.

Company overview        4

2.Nokia’s Strategy for Indian market        4

3.Fall of a giant        6

3.1 Market Myopia        6

3.2 Platform War        7