Nokia and the mobile phone market

TABLE OF CONTENT

1.Evolution of the Mobile Phone Market

2.Trends & Future of the mobile phone market

3.Nokia's Marketing Strategy

4.Competitors Strategies (especially Motorola and Ericsson)

5. Summary and conclusions

The mobile phone market

The birth of the mobile communication industry resulted of a professional need, which means that people on the move sometimes had to be contacted urgently. AT&T's Bell laboratories made it possible in 1979 in the United States permitted thousand of people to switch messages in the same tiny bandwith. The Nordic area was also one of the pioneers, establishing cellular services in 1978 with the Nordic Mobile Telephone.

In 1982 was introduced the GSM( Groupe Spécial Mobile) by France Telecom Research & Development in order to establish an European standards system. In 1985, the European Commission decided to impose this standard, and in 1987 thirteen countries signed a memorandum concerning the implementation of the GSM, which has become in 1989 the "Global System for Mobile Communications".

English: Photo of Nokia 2670 mobile phone

English: Inner front panel view of a cellular phon...

English: Motorola L71 (China Mobile customised mod...

The goals of this system consisted in two points:

Mobile phones are standardized and work on every operator' networks.

The network' elements (basic stations, switches...) are standardized, so it could be several suppliers and the competition can take place.

The American market had also his standard which called "TDMA".

By the beginning of 1993 was cellular service in place in more than 90 countries, resulted in several kinds of products like cellular phones obviously, but also pagers and PDAs( personal digital assistants). Pagers can received short messages in data and voice, and PDAs consisted in sending facsimile and e-mail, and eventually voice communication. But our interest will be focused on cellular phones because first, they have the advantage to provide an instant confirmation of receiving messages, and secondly, the main activity of Nokia is...