CEO Stephen Elop faced an uphill battle in Barcelona this morning when he took the stage for his Mobile World Congress keynote. The Microsoft-Nokia deal to put Windows 7 on a (still theoretical) new generation of Nokia smartphones has been pilloried in the press and on the stock market. Elsop may well be facing a rebellion on the part of shareholders and unions later this year.
Mobile carriers seem equally nonplussed. Yesterday, Verizon CTO Tony Melone said his company did not need to offer any future Nokia-Windows smartphones. Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and RIM BlackBerrys were enough ecosystems for him. Google CEO Eric Schmidt took an I-told-you-so approach in his keynote yesterday, revealing that he had implored Nokia to choose Android instead.
So in his keynote, Elop played to Nokia’s one remaining strength: global reach. “You’ve heard a lot about smartphones this week, but they’re only one part of our strategy,” he said. Elsop showed a map of the world with one pixel of light for everyone currently using a Nokia phone; it blazed brightly on every continent. “We believe there is an opportunity to make that much brighter,” Elsop said.
The Nokia Series 30 and 40 phones may be thoroughly outmoded in the sophisticated, smartphone-toting West. Nevertheless, Elop said, Nokia ships a whopping one million of these old-school mobiles every day. For millions in the developing world, they’re the only viable communications platform.
“Eighty percent of people around the world are within cell phone range, but only 20% of the global population is online,” he said.
By the end of the year, Elop said, Nokia would add maps and insta nt messaging to Series 40...
