Nokia’s Mark Louison: U.S. a game of inches: Unassuming leader aims to strike balance, build trust

Mark Louison’s unassuming manner dovetails well with Nokia Corp.’s efforts to project a kinder, gentler approach to the North American device market, an effort he has led for the past year.
“Alignment” with carrier needs is a term oft-repeated by handset vendors in discussing the U.S. market and Louison offered it, too.
But make no mistake:
Nokia’s future clearly goes well beyond the role of hardware vendor to embrace a future with recurring revenues in software-and-services, including content that could rival offerings by U.S. carriers.
And Louison is on a mission to “get results” across North America, he said.
Louison, now president of Nokia Inc., the company’s North American device business, formerly ran Nokia’s network infrastructure business here. He has been with Nokia six years and in wireless since 1983.
Nokia’s global brand, leading market share worldwide and its potential to reach consumers is not lost on American carriers. In a separate interview late last month with the Wall Street Journal, Louison acknowledged that U.S. carriers to a degree “remain skeptical.”
But in the wireless business, it’s often mutually beneficial to embrace rather than remain at arm’s length – even if that embrace is a wary one.
The sobering truth is that between 2006 and 2007, the latest, full year-on-year comparison available, Nokia’s U.S. market share dwindled from low double digits to high single digits. Clearly, circumstances call for an embrace, even a tango.
Louison said that his appointment a year ago came on the heels of Nokia’s decision to serve U.S. carriers’ needs and (insert wariness here) promote mutual benefits that also play to Nokia’s bigger strategy.
“A big element of our plans is to build an independent relationship with each operator and build a separate strategy for each of them,” Louison said during an interview at CTIA Wireless 2008.
“There’s subtlety in our approach to the U.S. market,” Louison said. “We’re collaborating with carriers on ‘productization.’ We’ve got traction on that now. The carriers are moving toward more open (device) channels. The subtlety there could be, ‘Let’s extend our collaboration to define these new devices.’ So collaboration can extend beyond productization to include ‘our’ effectiveness in sales channels, how ‘we’ drive the ‘open’ agenda in a way that’s collaborative, not combative.”
“It’s all about striking the right balance, building trust with operators by doing things in a visible way,” Louison said.
If Nokia formulated this strategy about a year-and-a-half ago, as Louison said, then why the perceptible delay that allowed Nokia’s share here to further erode before turning up the heat?
“You have to be smart about what you’ll do and equally smart about what you won’t do any more,” Louison said. “Nokia seeks a sustainable ‘platform’ (i.e., business strategy). Fortunately, we’re in a position where we can invest in the (North American) market in a way that helps us build a long-term, sustainable ‘platform.'”
Results, he said, take about two years to realize.
In the North American market, Nokia asked itself “how can we apply our assets in a directed way?” Louison said. “We’re about a year-and-a-half into that plan.”
That would make 2008 a very important year for Nokia in the U.S. He characterized Motorola Inc.’s current travails, which open opportunities in the U.S., where Motorola still holds the lion’s share of the market, as “a distraction.” A sustainable business strategy cannot rely on the weakness of others, according to Louison.
As for the embrace with U.S. carriers using GSM technology, Nokia is serving AT&T Mobility with its San Diego design facility. (Nokia also has offices in Atlanta, adjacent to AT&T Mobility’s.) The first result was the Nokia 6555, which, according to Louison, has sold well.
Nokia is “farthest ahead” with T-Mobile USA Inc., supporting the carrier’s popular My Faves user interface. All Nokia phones at T-Mobile USA have a My Faves-branded homepage. Nokia supports T-Mobile USA’s HotSpot@Home initiative with embedded UMA-clients and Wi-Fi in handsets. As T-Mobile USA builds out its 3G network, Nokia is positioned to assist.
Nokia’s “co-DM” strategy will serve its efforts with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. in the near-term, while it works with the two carriers on their respective aspirations in LTE and WiMAX where Nokia offers end-to-end, handset-to-network solutions. (Nokia unveiled its N810 Internet Tablet-WiMAX Edition for Sprint Nextel at the CTIA show earlier this month.)
“Our aspiration in this market is to be the leader,” Louison said. “That clearly needs to be our aspiration. To do so in this market, we need to be relevant in CDMA.”
The co-DM model calls for Nokia and an ODM partner to design handsets using CDMA licenses with Qualcomm Inc. – sidestepping, for the near future, licensing issues that could slow Nokia’s U.S. market initiative – with Nokia handling the go-tomarket strategy.
The Nokia 2135 handset was the first result, out last fall, and delivered to regional CDMA operators such as MetroPCS Communications Inc. At CTIA, the Nokia 1606 and 3606 were announced, also destined for regional CDMA operators, Louison said.
Finally, Nokia will unveil its touchscreen offering here later this year and Louison said it would dovetail with Nokia’s larger services and content play. That could make a carrier deal difficult. Whether Nokia will attempt to strike a carrier deal or ply its alternative, direct-to-consumer channels has not been broached. Which brings us full circle to U.S. operators’ concerns about Nokia’s power to bypass them, eventually, in a more open market.
“We’ve got these great assets,” Louison said. “How do we align our interests with those of the carriers?”