Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO and president, visited Brazil twice in less than a year—once in November 2011 and again this week. It is unusual for a device manufacturing company to have its global CEO visiting an emerging country so often. In Nokia’s case, it shows how much the company is looking at (and betting on) growing markets, especially Brazil, where the company led cellphone sales in the past.
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Elop said he is very excited about the future smartphone launches in the country. Once in Brazil, he announced that the Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 with the Windows Phone 8 will be available in the first quarter of 2013. “We want to connect the next billion people to the Internet,” he said when launching the new Nokia Siemens Network (NSN) manufacturing plant in partnership with Flextronics.
On the stage, he complemented Brazil’s government for its work on LTE deployment. “The Brazilian government has taken an important step with LTE and will create jobs through mobile manufacturing,” he said.
In speaking about Brazil, Elop commented on another Nokia launch: the Asha 308, a less expensive alternative to the Lumia smartphone series. “The Asha family meets Brazil’s lower price demand,” he said.
The last time Elop visited the country, he announced the local manufacturing of the Asha series and the Lumia 710. Nokia has a manufacturing site in Manaus in northern Brazil.
Microsoft’s Windows 8 platform was launched globally on Thursday, Oct. 25. Malik Saadi, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said that this was probably the most important announcement in Microsoft’s history since the launch of its Windows 3.0 in 1990. “It is an operating system which promises to take the computing experience to another level,” he said.
Saadi added that “Microsoft is now promoting the ‘personalized computing experience,’ where the experience is no longer attached to a computer but defined as a framework tailored to the user’s needs regardless of the nature of the device being used.”
Informa’s early estimates indicate that by the end of 2014, more than 70% of users will be on Microsoft Windows 8 and 36% will use its new hardware supporting touchscreen.
