It’s a rebirth for brand Nokia.
It’s a rebirth for brand Nokia. But in its second coming, the brand that is now looked after by HMD Global, is also going through growing pains. The journey since Nokia 6 was launched in China in middle of 2016 has not been easy. It has been slow, marred by supply constraints for the newly-created phone company. Now, in the middle of 2018, it seems that the first phase of HMD’s journey is over. It’s time for the company switch gears, its top leadership says. And while it shifts the gears, for now the engines for its next lag of the journey are going be the Nokia 6.1 Plus and the Nokia 5.1 Plus.
The two phones were launched earlier this week in India. And two mark a big change in the way HMD Global, a company that is mostly staffed by former Nokia leadership, does its business in India. Both the Nokia 6.1 Plus and the Nokia 5.1 Plus are going to be online-exclusive phones. The Nokia 6.1 Plus, for example, is going to be available only on Flipkart and HMD’s online store in India at the Nokia website. Given that the economics of selling phones online is different from offline, it also gives HMD Global some leeway in the way it prices phones. For now, it is going to price the Nokia 6.1 Plus and the Nokia 5.1 much more aggressively than how it positioned its earlier phones.
The Nokia 6.1 Plus debuts in India at a price point of Rs 15,999 and it squarely takes aim at the Xioami Redmi Note 5 Pro, a phone that is wildly popular here. The Nokia 5.1 Plus is yet to get a price tag — it will go on sale in September and its price will be revealed later — but it is expected to go head-to-head against Redmi 5 in India.
„We are turning a new page. Going forward you will see HMD Global that is more aggressive in the market,“ Juho Sarvikas, HMD Global chief product officer, tells the India Today Tech. „The last few years we have spent time building the platform from where we can launch ourselves. That is done. We have built the supply chain, have re-built the distribution channels that Nokia earlier had. Now, we intend to move to the next stage.“
This next stage for HMD Global is going to be based on a mix of different business and product strategies. „We will serve both offline and online channels. For online we will partner with major e-retail sites in India as well as use the Nokia store that we have spent over a year building. For offline, we will leverage the distribution channel that we have rebuilt,“ says Ajey Mehta, vice president (India) at HMD Global.
However, even as HMD Global adopts the online-only model for some of its phones, the company says that unlike Xiaomi or Honor it won’t go for the flash sale model. „In the last one year we have ramped up production by 1.5X. We are hopeful of meeting demand and keeping the Nokia 6.1 Plus in stock,“ says Mehta.
The Nokia 6.1 Plus, which we reviewed earlier, is indeed a kind of phone that may find many takers. It gets almost everything right, and there is an impression that when it goes on sale on August 30 it may not remain in stock for too long.
While the online-exclusive model will help HMD Global meet aggressive price points and „reach out to millennials and young consumers who mainly shop online“, the company hopes to get into the top 5 Indian phone brands in the coming months and years using its product strengths and expertise.
„We have built the capability to quickly rollout Android One software to all our current phones and in the coming months we will update all Nokia phones launched this year to Android 9 Pie. We think the clean Android software in our phones gives us a big advantage,“ says Sarvikas. „We will also continue to leverage our expertise in design and build materials, Nokia phones are beautiful as well as use our partnership with Zeiss to offer superior camera experience.“
Mehta says India is a very important market for HMD Global — „the company’s product portfolio team is based in India“ — and it hopes to be among the Top 3 phone brands in the country in the next three years. „We are doubling down on everything that we do. Earlier, there were some constraints, particularly supply related. They have been fixed,“ says Mehta.
However, what Mehta, and Sarvikas, in their interaction with the India Today Tech won’t explicitly say, even if it is all apparent, is that HMD Global is done setting the stage. And now finally, using the brand Nokia, it is going after Xiaomi and Honor in India’s mainstream phone market. And it is no longer going to hold itself back when it comes to aggressively priced phones.
