MARKETING

Strategic Marketing for Mobile Handset Industry

Table of Contents

Introduction1

Environmental analysis for the mobile handset industry1

PESTLE2

Political2

Economic2

Social2

Technological3

Environmental3

Legal3

SWOT3

Strengths3

Weaknesses4

Opportunities4

Threats5

Porter's 5 Forces framework5

Threat of new entrants5

Power of suppliers5

Powers of buyers5

Threats of substitute's products5

Competitive rivalry6

Recommendation on a strategic direction6

Feasibility of chosen strategy6

Conclusion7

References8

Strategic Marketing for Mobile Handset Industry

Introduction

The dynamics of the mobile phone industry have changed dramatically. The leading player of the market was always Nokia that not only dominated the market through its market share but had an unmatched loyal customer base. Recently, however, the company has lost its ground in major markets such as the United States of America, United Kingdom and Africa. This change has been brought by tablets and android devices. The new iPhone 5 has taken the market which now wants smart phones by storm (Gronroos, 2004, p.9). The popular brands of yesterday that is Nokia, LG, Sony Ericsson and others have been replaced with Apple, Samsung and HTC. These new players are not only gaining their market share in the aforementioned regions but also expanding themselves to other geographical areas such as Asia, Latin America and Africa which are growing markets when compared with UK and US. In this context, it is imperative to understand that Nokia it is not the end of the world in that Nokia can explore new markets or geographical areas where it can make use of effective strategic management to regain its market share (IANS, 2012). In this context, India has been selected as a promising market. The paper discusses the environmental analysis for the mobile handset industry with recommendations for Nokia.

Environmental analysis for the mobile handset industry

The external environmental analysis in India suggests that the sale of phones has increased phenomenally this year breaking the 50 million bar in the first quarter of the running year alone. This meant a 9.1% increase in sales from the last year figures. Out of the total number of handsets that were sold during the quarter, smart phones had only 5.3% of the share. This does not mean that the Indian market does not want to buy smart phones as the trend is an increasing one. It only means that the purchasing power in India on a massive level does not support the growing statistics. The most dominant category of phones was the ones with dual or multiple sims. These made up over 66% of the total sales (Sharma, 2012a). This means that people want these phones. The change in packages by mobile GSM providers, people have a preference to quickly switch from one network to another as the switching cost is ignorable.

As concerns the market distribution in terms of industry players, Nokia has managed to maintain its leadership yet another time. The company retain 23% share of the market. This was closely followed by Samsung which has about 15% of the market share (Kotler & Armstrong , 2004, p. 120 ). There is another local brand by the name of Micromax which has managed to gain a 5.8% share of the ...