Telecom Lead Asia: D Shivakumar, operations head for India, West Asia and Africa, at the phone major Nokia, has resigned.
Economic Times reported that Shivakumar, after spending 8 years with the struggling phone company, will be heading back to India after the June quarter.
Before moving to a global role in late 2011 and shifting base to Dubai, Shivakumar was heading Nokia’s operations in India. Nokia India is facing a Rs 2,000 crore notice by the Income Tax Department at present for alleged wrong practices.
Nokia’s Senior Vice President for emerging markets – India, Middle East and Africa Region said he would not be associated with mobility, telecommunications and FMCG in his next endeavor.
Recently, Samsung’s India head Ranjit Yadav resigned and joined the Tata Group to look after a part of the automobile business.
In March 2013, BlackBerry’s India head Sunil Dutt resigned.
Though Nokia is out of the top 5 smartphone vendors in Q4 2012, the Finnish major is still the second largest phone vendor with 17.9 percent share with 86.3 million shipments.
IDC says Samsung, which grabbed market share from Nokia and BlackBerry, has shipped 111.2 million phones to grab 23 percent share of the rapidly growing market.
Recently, market research agency IHS said Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S4 will enable the company to extend its mobile handset market share lead over Nokia to 11 percent in 2013 compared with 2012.
This means both Asha and Lumia are not adding significant gains to Nokia’s market share. Nokia’s devices business revenue plummeted 36 percent in fourth quarter of last year.
Phone major Nokia’s Devices & Services division sold 15.9 million units of smartphone in the fourth quarter 2012. This includes 9.3 million Asha full touch smartphones in Mobile Phones; 4.4 million Lumia smartphones in Smart Devices and 2.2 million Symbian smartphones in Smart Devices.
Nokia in its latest annual report said that a feature phone-specific ecosystem has emerged involving very low-cost components and manufacturing processes. Speed to market and attractive pricing are critical factors for success in affordable devices.
Globally, Nokia’s revenue declined 22 percent to €30.176 billion from €38.659 billion in 2011.
Indian telecom market has remained the second largest revenue generator for Nokia in 2012, behind China, despite falling sales.
Nokia — in its latest annual report said — the 10 markets in which Nokia generated the greatest net sales in 2012 were, in descending order of magnitude, China, India, Japan, the United States, Brazil, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Italy, together representing approximately 52 percent of total net sales in 2012.
