Nokia has forayed into a retail distribution model

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 20 July 2010, 22:46 IST
Printer Print Email Email
Kolkata: Nokia, betting big on its bouquet of mobile services to win back lost market share, has forayed into a retail distribution model. It has set up 350 shop-in-shops inside mobile phone retail stores in top 16 cities from where it plans to distribute and sell services such as applications, music, navigation and email solutions, reports Writankar Mukherjee from The Economic Times. Nokia has plans to scale this up in a big way, especially in the rural areas, once the pilot phase is over in another six months. "Since PC and broadband penetration is low in India, it is important to build a retail distribution model to take services to the masses," said Nokia India Head Jasmeet Gandhi. Nokia India is also soon coming with a local billing model for its mobile applications store, Ovi Store. At present, there are around 50,000 applications in the store. "We will also make available the applications store in our services retail point so that consumers can conveniently buy mobile applications there. While free music is currently available in five handsets, we plan to take this to handsets across price bands or at least the top 15 models. This even includes the mass market range which runs on the S40 operating system," added Gandhi. The retail distribution from Nokia comes at a time when the company has already made a few of its services free in India. It has already made navigation service free and has recently announced free unlimited download of music with select handsets. Nokia feels such a strategy will be vital as more than 80 percent of Indian consumers already access or download free digital content.