A co-ordinated approach or an accident of timing? This week Nokia announced further severe cuts and sell-offs, but put a gloss on things by claiming that a renewed focus on its location based services capability would drive further revenues in the enterprise and M2M sectors.
As it announced a host of further restructuring and some high profile departures, it added that it had looked around the cupboard, found an old tin called “location based services” and decided that it would give it a polish, put it in the shopfront and see if there were any takers.
Well, actually, what is said is that it would, “Invest in location-based services as an area of competitive differentiation for Nokia products and extend its location-based platform to new industries.”
Just a day later, it announced a global partnership with Everything Everywhere that will see vending machines that are linked to Nokia’s M2M application platform equipped with EE SIMs. But not only that, the deployment will also hook in NFC for payment, as well as offering vendors the chance to message users in the vicinity of the machine.
Dave McQueen, Principal Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, hit on the main point. Nokia has had mapping and location services in its locker for a few years now and has done little in terms of generating returns from that.
“Location has to be an important differentiator for Nokia having paid $8.1bn for Navteq 5 years ago and there is still no discernable ROI. Nokia’s mapping offers a better experience than Google’s, plus new applications like Nokia Maps, Drive, Transport and City Lens should be at the forefront of its marketing. Apple dropping Google maps also makes this space interesting.”
One of the people tasked with generating the return on that investment is Niklas Savander, who as executive vice president of markets headed up many of Nokia’s services efforts, including Ovi, Maps, Messaging, and other doomed attempts to diversify the Nokia brand and revenue. But as Nokia re-targets location as a key differentiator, Savander will not be amongst those responsible as he is being asked to leave, after a longish career at the vendor.
Another long-serving Nokia name leaving the management team is Mary McDowell, who steps down as executive vice president of Mobile Phones. More recent appointee, CMO Jerri DeVard is also heading for the exit. Savander and McDowell had seemed immune to the last few years' of managerial changes, despite the struggles Nokia had had in Savander's area in particular. But no longer. DeVard was a strange appointment in the first place, in my opinion, and possibly one that was intended to foster better partner relations in the USA, given her previous background with Verizon. She lasted a little less than 18 months, however.
Coming onto the leadership team are Juha Putkiranta as executive vice president of operations and Timo Toikkanen as executive vice president of mobile phones. Chris Weber is the new head of sales and marketing, and there’s a new head of communications, Susan Sheehan. (She’s certainly going to be busy.) That all adds up to a pretty major refresh that addresses feature phones, marketing and communications.
McDowell and Savander are not alone, though, as Nokia announced that, actually, another 10,000 positions will go globally by the end of 2013. Letting that number of people go will cost the operator charges of approximately EUR 1.0 billion. That’s a lot of M2M connections, isn’t it?
There was another strategic pointer this week to how operators will react to the new roaming environment. Vodafone announced that it would be tweaking its main European area roaming deal to offer users the ability to make calls, send text and access the internet at the same rates they pay within their home tarrif. In other words: no roaming premium, save for the fact that to get access to the service you have to pay £3 a day for each day you use roaming services. I admit I may have been a bit suckered by this one, thinking at first that it was a decent deal that offered clarity to users. But what I missed was that it is probably a much better deal for someone who needs to make a lot of roaming voice calls, than a data user. That is because Vodafone’s Data Traveller already offered a reasonably workable 25Mb daily allowance for £10 per month, or £2 a day on a one-off basis.
It’s only one tariff from one national operator, so let’s not get carried away, but it is perhaps a sign that operators will get more canny on roaming pricing, as they face disruption to the market. I liked Data Traveller as a deal, and thought that when Telefonica recently launched a similar deal it was playing catch-up. Now I’m not sure that Euro Traveller (the £3 per day for home rates deal) will be so popular.
Is that what the EC means by fostering roaming innovation? Probably not.
Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe
Mobile Europe hosted two webinars this week that addressed topical issues affecting mobile operators. Both are now available to view on demand.
This session looked at how operators can use customer experience management technology to support their customer service teams. Aricent’s Tom Lybarger took the view that by supporting customer service with data from the device, application and network layers, operators can deal with customers in a more intelligent and responsive way.
The second webinar was on the theme of how operators can start building heterogenous networks now, without having to wait for the clutch of LTE R10 technologies that support coordination and interference management. The Small Cell Forum’s Simon Saunders and Alcatel-Lucent’s Bernd Herold both took the view that there are tools and techniques available now that can deal with the interference issues that are giving mobile operators pause for thought.
