Nokia

Cellphone giant Nokia is continuing to expand worldwide. In April, it announced that it would start a manufacturing facility for mobile devices in Chennai, India--its tenth production facility globally.

This could be a sign that the company has recoverd from a rough patch. When Nokia realized that it was losing market share to swanky clamshell handsets created by the likes of Samsung and LG, the Finnish cellphone maker had already lost 6 percentage points of its market share in the first quarter last year.

In addition, shares of the cellphone giant--which sold over 200 million cellphones last year--fell by half in value between March and August in 2004.

After taking action to reclaim its glory, such as producing clamshell models and beefing up the design department, Nokia managed to stabilize its market position--though some analysts still question if the cellphone maker has really recovered from the cold spell.

Jorma Ollila, Nokia's chairman and chief executive, admitted that the company has had gaps in its product portfolio, and its internal reorganization into different business units has steered its focus away from the competition.

Nokia also changed its tack on refusing to hardware-customize handsets for operators, which its competitors are doing. Rather than risk putting its market share on the table, the company changed some production lines to produce customized handsets where there is high-volume demand.

What about the next area of growth? Nokia executives have identified the business user market, multimedia such as music and games--although it didn't sell as many Ngage (gaming deck and phone hybrid) devices compared to Nintendo and Sony.

But for the future, Nokia thinks it will be a leader in handsets, though it may not come out tops.

In the enterprise space, a fairly new area for the company, Nokia is putting in efforts to provide enterprises with a competitive, focused mobile device range and platform, as well as connectivity solutions. Early this year, it inked a deal with Avaya to load the Avaya Communication Manager software into its Series 60 phones. This allows business users to transform their mobile devices into fully-functional office phones.