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: business development, Nokia India.

The company’s E-series of high-end phones has recently become quite popular in the country and Nokia is now working towards making its business devices more affordable. As per the Q4’07 results over two million Nokia Eseries devices were shipped in the last quarter.

Says Prashant Singhal, a telecom expert with Ernst & Young, “The services side of the market is huge, but the revenues get split between the vendor and the service provider. However, handset makers are now thinking about what they can offer on the services side that a service provider cannot. So, in this arena, the competition really is with the service provider.”

One more area where Nokia is far ahead of its competitors is in realising India’s manufacturing prowess. The handset major has one manufacturing unit in Chennai, in which it has announced a fresh investment of $75 million, taking Nokia’s cumulative investment in the plant to $285 million. The facility not only continues to feed India’s fuelling handset demand, but also of other countries. “We currently export over 50% of our production to 58 countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand,” says Sachin Saxena, operations director OLS, Nokia India.