By R. Jai Krishna
Nokia Corp. is trying to regain some of its lost ground in India, eyeing the high-end smartphone user in the country with its new Lumia 1020 handset launch Friday.
The Finnish company has priced the phone at 50,000 rupees ($818) per unit, slightly higher than the $800 price tag in some other global markets, and far higher than its nearest competitors.
Nokia, which was the top seller of phones in India until 2012, has steadily lost ground to competitors such as Samsung Electronics Co. With Friday's launch of the Lumia 1020, the Finnish company hopes to narrow the gap with current market leader Samsung.
Nokia however faces an uphill task as it tries to take on not only Samsung's Galaxy S4 Zoom, but also Sony Corp.'s Xperia Z1 that was introduced in India last month. Samsung's Galaxy S4 Zoom sells for 30,590 rupees, while the Xperia Z1 costs 44,990 rupees.
This is also Nokia's first launch of a smartphone in India, the world's second largest telecom market, after the company was acquired by Microsoft Corp. for about $7 billion early in September.
In India, the Nokia Lumia 1020 launch comes at a time when smartphone shipments to the country almost tripled from a year earlier to 9.3 million units during the quarter ended June 30, data from research firm IDC showed. The company also launched the phone just before a series of Hindu festivals begin from October, a period when Indians consider it auspicious to buy consumer goods such as phones and cars. Most Indians get a bonus during Diwali, the Indian festival of light, which leaves them with extra cash to spend on buying products and services.
Nokia ranked fourth with a 5.4% share in terms of smartphone shipments in India in the quarter that ended June 2013, way behind market leader Samsung which had 26%. Local handset companies Micromax Informatics Ltd. and Karbonn Mobiles took second and third positions with 22% and 13% shares respectively, data from IDC showed. Sony was nipping closely at Nokia's heels with a 5.1% market share.
The dual-SIM Nokia Lumia 1020 weighs 158 grams, comes with a 4.5 inch screen size, has a 41 megapixel PureView camera, with a Carl Zeiss lens that is used in high-end cameras for clear pictures. The handset operates on Microsoft Windows 8 mobile phone software and a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor.
The company says the phone, which has a wireless charging facility, will work on basic cellphone networks for 19.1 hours after a single power charging, and 13.3 hours on third-generation, or 3G communication networks. The handset has a 32-gigabit memory and offers 7-gigabit storage on the Internet.
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