Why Does Nokia Sell More Phones Than Apple?

If you compare Nokia and Apple you would naturally think that Apple and its iPhone is more popular than Nokia. You would also have to reconsider once you looked at the numbers. Take a look at this article to find out who really sells the most mobile phones.

Nokia is on deck to sell around 500 million units this year. Apple by comparison, until the third quarter of this year ( 2010 ), has sold a “paltry” 8.4 million iPhones. Will Apple make up the other 491.6 million iPhones by the end of the year ? No, they will not. So, why is Apple so popular ? One reason is that Steve Jobs is a master at marketing. The Apple company knows how to create a “buzz” about their products. This makes them sit at center-screen for months before they actually release a product. The internet loves a good rumor as much as those daytime soap operas. Nokia, on the other hand is behind the scenes, giving people good quality at a good price.

Not many know that Nokia-Siemens recently bought out part of Motorola. Nokia also recently bought the whole Symbian operating system and set the code up as open source to the world. Symbian is the world´s number one most popular mobile operating system. Would you know that from the news on the internet ? Probably not. What has Apple been buying ? They have been buying things to offset their lack of advertising base against their Google nemesis. Google outbid Apple on the Admob advertising system, so Apple picked up seconds. Their choice turned out to be Quattro Wireless, which they paid $275 million dollars for. It may sound like a big deal to you and I. Not to Nokia. They paid $410 million dollars just to take Symbian. They immediately made it true open source software.

Nokia bought a software company recently to help them make Ovi Maps. They paid $8.1 billion ( with a “B” ) dollars for the Navteq company that created the mapping software. People on the go are obviously going to need maps to help them get to and from their destinations. Apple has just gotten started with this area of mobile services. They nearly secretly bought out a mapping company called Placebase. They also bought a “geographic 3D globe” company called Poly9. Apple bought them around a month ago. It is a good thing, the only other choice an Apple user has had recently is Google and their maps.

Nokia simply has more money and more power to expand because it sells more phones. Nokia started making phones in 1992 in Texas. Apple started in 2007. Just one mobile network that Nokia covers has half a billion subscribers. That is with that letter “B” again. AT&T is the exclusive network that handles the iPhone. AT&T was happy to report they added 2.7 million wireless subscribers this year. As of last November, they had 79 to 82 million wireless subscribers. Looking at how those two numbers compare, you see that just one 500 billion subscriber-base compared to one exclusive 82 million subscriber-base for Apple shows a clear advantage for Nokia.

The chief executive of Nokia has stated; ” We have the widest portfolio in the industry and the deepest understanding of it, as opposed to having one or two hit products at a time.”. This is what makes Nokia superior in selling mobile phones over Apple. Now to keep our eyes set on Samsung, which is the real competitor for Nokia.

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1 comment

  1. Well said. I always like people pointing out the obvious unlike so many other apple bias writers.

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