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Telecommunications Nokia no longer cool, so sales cooling
Telecommunications Nokia no longer cool, so sales cooling | Nokia no longer cool, so sales cooling |
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| Written by Stuart Corner | |
| Tuesday, 05 September 2006 | |
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However Nokia has just announced a new range of fashion phones, the L'Amour range, with an excess of hyperbole, in a bid to regain its status in the phone fashion stakes. According to GfK, Nokia continues to dominate the market overall with 43 percent of new phone sale but has lost significant ground in the under 25 market, where it has 31 percent, followed by Motorola at 27 percent. GfK Australia's research project manager, David Griffin, said: "We found that 50 percent of 15-17 year olds replaced their mobile phone within the past 12 months, compared to 21 percent in the 35-44 years category and just 15 percent for over 55s. "The drivers for change were also different across the age groups. While a majority of people chose to upgrade because their previous handset was out of date or unfashionable, the under 25s was the only group which cited the design and appearance of their handset as the most important factor when choosing their new handset...Younger people are all about phone fashion and our research shows that Motorola clearly does this best. According to our data, Motorola was the only brand where the most popular reason for purchase was design and appearance rather than price, features or functionality." According to Griffin, if Australia continues to follow the US trend, then Nokia has cause for concern. "Many analysts attribute Nokia's late adoption of the popular clamshell form as the reason for its loss in sales and our research has confirmed the importance of handset appearance. Certainly, this new study is a wake-up call to all mobile phone manufacturers that they cannot afford to ignore design and fashion issues when targeting new phone buyers," he said. The independent Internet-based survey canvassed 1026 mobile phone users, who, GfK, says were nationally representative in terms of age, gender and location, on their reasons for changing their handset and/or network provider. It intends to repeat the study every three months to monitor changing trends across the Australian population. GfK says its research found that 55 percent of Australians had changed either their mobile phone handset or network provider in the past 12 months and of those surveyed, 88 percent changed their handset while 27 percent switched to a different network provider.
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