Nokia Penetrating with Dual Sim Phones

The year 2011 was such an important and progressive year for Pakistan’s mobile industry that it emerged it as the 9th largest mobile market around the world. This trend is also reflected in TNS – a global research organization’s Mobile Life report which indicated that the country has now got more than 103 million phones, while some sources put the actual number of users near 130 million. The shipment of 1.5 billion phones by Nokia Corp. also marks 2011 as a landmark year.

If we go back in the past, we see the country as an immature market with just 300 thousand subscribers as of 2001. But with the rapid growth in Telecom sector in the last decade, Pakistan has now at the vanguard of the mobile revolution in the emerging world. This changed the lives of millions of people across the country since mobile based devices became vital source of communication and hence contributed in the development of both the rural and urban economies.

Analyzing the processing power, it’s surprising to see that today’s top phones often have as much or even more processing power than a desktop PC did 5 years ago. However in Pakistan, consumers are fascinated by the multi-SIM phones along with the flexible pricing/billing plans offered by different Operators, which served as a foundation of the country’s mobile revolution. With the passage of time ordinary mobile users got matured to smart ones, resulting in increased demands of high quality handsets and access to online services like internet and so on.

To cope up with the data hungry demands of smart customers, the infrastructure has been upgraded by pushing heavy investments from both the public and private sectors.

In reaction to these defies, Nokia used its world class birthright in mobile phone development to produce a range of Dual SIM phones that offer users an intuitive, feature-rich experience at low price last year. Targeting Pakistani customers, Nokia along with other products introduced the concept of Easy Swap which can remember up to five SIM cards through intensive research and careful development.

The outcome was the Nokia X1-01 and C2-00 – economical phones which come with more memory, a better battery life and in-built SIM change possibilities. Nokia collaborated with Telenor on the research project regarding Dual SIM handsets and launched its Dual SIM product lineup, which made Telenor the second largest mobile operator in Pakistan by dramatically increasing its Dual SIM phone sales from 80,000 to around 850,000 in just 11 months. This signified a momentous proportion of the 3.3 million Dual SIM handsets that Nokia shipped in Q3 and Q4 last year demonstrating that users are looking for feature-rich phones at reasonable prices.

These innovations, rather than reducing operator incomes, are actually driving Average Revenues per Unit (ARPUs), as well as taming the user experience. The World Cellular Information Service reported about Telenor, that ARPUs across all its metrics, including both post-paid and pre-paid, were stable between March and June 2011.

At the head of every Operator’s plan is to get more and more people online. Pakistan’s mobile phone industry is moving at a rapid pace that has been demonstrated by the population as they are eager to grip quality phones. Moreover, majority of consumers in Pakistan consider mobile phones a requirement of life and consider almost all features of a handset while purchasing. This trend is indicated by a research paper published in the International Journal of Business and Social Science last year, by the researchers of University of the Punjab.

In Pakistan, the latest industry indicators demonstrate that GPRS data usage on Nokia handsets is now around 40% across the board. Tied with that around 23% of Dual SIM X2-01 users which have become first-time internet users, feeling the benefits of apps, enjoying multi-media messaging and for the first time acting as a host of other online activities.

Recently, Nokia has promised to connect a billion people, which is another step in the realization of the goal as consumers are evolved beyond the standard phone calls and SMSs into a media-rich user experience due to the increase in personal relationships are.

It seems that this year will also be a stimulating year for the mobile industry in Pakistan since both handset activation and consumers are projected to rise at even more pace than the previous year. This is because more and more people are expected on the way to access the internet for the first time.

Nokia is planning to shape up its successful partnership with Telenor in bringing feature-heavy phones at reasonable prices in Pakistan and is also in discussion with other operators across the country to help customers benefit from cheap internet data bundles!