One of the biggest cell phone manufacturers in the world, Nokia, has reaffirmed their stance on the African amrket, as they are set to unveil new products.
Nokia’s CEO of HMD Global, Florian Seiche, spoke during a recent webinar saying the African continent has always been their primary focus to market their latest goods.
The Finland-based phone maker stated that Africa is still a big market for its feature phone segment.
The company also aims to invest in migrating some customers to its 4G-enabled smarter feature phones.
Seiche also took note of the fact that through HMD Global, a company that operates Nokia mobile phone business, they still identified a massive opportunity in SA’s feature phone market.
On top of that, Nokia is also changing gears and shifting focus to upgrade a large number of feature phone customers to what it calls entry-level smartphones – which operate on 4G networks.
ITWeb carried a report indicating that the feature phone is still a mobile of choice in Africa, thus making up more than half of the user base.
“We are still seeing strong demand for feature phones in South Africa and Africa, and our strategy is two-fold. Our position is to provide customers with fantastic quality at an affordable price,” said Seiche.
“We are also working with our carrier customers across Africa, and specifically in South Africa, to bring the feature phone customer base to the 4G network as fast as possible.
“And because we have a large base of feature phone customers, we want to continue serving them with our good quality feature phones, and at the same time we are looking forward to bringing a bigger percentage of them to the 4G smartphone range with our C series.”
Also forming part of the webinar was Shaun Durandt, who is the GM of HMD Global Sub-Saharan Africa, he explained that the company wants to increase its portfolio of 4G-enabled feature phones.
“Feature phones are massively important for us in South Africa, and the 105 is our bread-and-butter, so that’s where we are focusing on,” explained Durandt.
“South Africa as a market is guided by operator behaviour – and our many feature phone users are going to be entry-level smart phone users.”
Part of the high-end feature phones are: Nokia 8210 4G:A 1990s icon, with 4G and intuitive user interface, Nokia 2660 Flip:A flip phone with a 32GB microSD card and Bluetooth 5.0, Nokia 5710 Xpress Audio:Comes with in-built wireless earbuds and runs on an in-house S30+ OS, with 128MB of RAM.
Main image: Nokia Mobile/Twitter
