“Nokia will close its two flagship stores in the United States, a market where the world’s top cellphone maker is struggling to gain ground,” Tarmo Virki reports for Reuters. “Nokia said it would close the stores in New York and Chicago.”
“Improving the company’s position in the U.S. market has been a priority for Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo since he started to run Nokia in 2006,” Virki reports. “Since then, however, the company’s U.S. market share has eroded to well below 10 percent.”
Nokia is also closing one of its two stores in London and its Sao Paolo store… ‘This confirms a turn in Nokia’s retail strategy. It has failed to replicate Apple’s success with this format of store,’ said Ben Wood, director of research at British consultancy CCS.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is a perfect CEO for Nokia. They’re both failures.
“iPhone is a niche product.” – Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, April 17, 2008
Want to watch Nokia’s decline? Don’t blink.
Verilöyly.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “JES42” for the heads up.]
I wonder if the leasing companies will be keeping Nokia’s deposits since they have to clean so much blood off the floors.
84
I hope they wear rubber gloves.
@siverhawk…
They’ll hire the guy from Pulp Fiction to do clean-up.
That’s a heck of a spin MDN. I’m getting dizzy…
I don’t think Nokia is failing just because they closed three stores. (New York, Chicago, London) Does any other handset maker — that only makes handsets and communication devices — even have a store?
wow. who’d a thought a company that sold the exact same product for 10 years would face competition and declining margins!
Mr. Reeee,
that would be Mr. Wolf (Harvey Keitel) the fixer
Nokia isn’t failing because of three closed stores, but the three closed stores are a symptom of Nokia’s failure, just like the embarrassments of the “Comes-with-Music” debacle, the Ovi fiasco, the dizzying array of cell phone models (over 200) and mobile OSes (is it 3 or 4 different OSes they are using now?), utter lack of interest in Symbian as a Mobile OS by anyone but Nokia, complete lack of penetration in the US mobile market and inability to create a app store, music store or SDK that anyone wants to use or cares about.
Otherwise, yes, complete spin by MDN.
Nokia rules!! Long live Apple……. errr, I mean Nokia.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
“The development of mobile phones will be similar in PCs,” predicts Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s chief strategist. “Even with the Mac, Apple has attracted much attention at first, but they have still remained a niche manufacturer. That will be in mobile phones as well.”
http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/23194/
Strategize that byatch…
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”tongue rolleye” style=”border:0;” />
Floundering Finns falling flat and facing failure? Flagging from fragmented features or fortuitous fluke?
When you only have something like 7 stores, closing 4 is a big deal. When are they closing Helsinki?
Also, to answer a question, Palm had stores at airports, and Sony Ericsson has stores.
Third World Strategy. Nokia doesn’t care about rich countries anymore, as they have no hope of regaining market share where people can afford better phones. So instead they’re going to sell boatloads of cheap junk to poor people.
Not going to work.
Worst of all, Nokia sold 10 times more phones than Apple last quarter but they STILL LOST MONEY. (Several hundred million dollars in the red last quarter.)
Ampar the Alliterater!
Today’s Apple is immune to those buggish Replicators.
Maybe Nokia should go from 80% Koskenkorva vodka to 60% for liquid replenishment in tha sauna held strategy meetings, i mean just to clear their head a little…
Nokia -has- had stores?
“Alliterater!”
Aye, enzos.
Even though I love my iPhone it is sad to see Nokia fail like this. Before I got my iPhone I was a dedicated Nokia user.
But to call the iPhone “a niche product” just shows a complete misunderstanding of the market. The iPhone has redefined the mainstream.
Nokia is finished.
I hope he didn’t mean to say São Paulo, Brazil.
I think this is going to end very ugly.
It has all the hallmarks of a looming “grounding”.
As mike says: 10 years of doing nothing will get you there.
But I guess they honestly thought that polyphonic ringtones and user-replaceable covers counted as “innovation”.
Keep that Oil of your Pecker dudes!
Nokia thrived in a market that had little experience of mobile communications and where landline was entrenched slowing in the early years the real need to develop it quickly. Finland of course had a limited and extremely expensive (not to mention prone to failure due to weather) to run landline network. For them wireless was a necessity not a luxury. In that environment they were king and were able to export their supremacy around the world. Things have changed and the whole world sees wireless as vital. The rest of the World is also where most of the research, the wealth behind it and increasingly the market lies too. The Finns now find themselves a cut off island of research and experience that is increasingly being swallowed by a wave of global warming to the mobile necessity.
Being so far removed from that reality Nokia is almost certainly set for slow (for the moment) but sure decline to obscurity. The fact that a spokes person is trying to use outdated evidence to write off Apple when far more relevant and appropriate evidence albeit of a similar nature points to their own demise says it all about how in denial they truly are. Now that is true irony.
@ Grimmac,
I hope you meant Brasil. Since the US is pretty much the only country that spells it Brazil. The Z is actually an S.