Nokia Corp, battered by the popularity of smartphones, is abandoning the Japanese market after a brief foray with luxury cellphones costing as much as ￥20 million (US$250,000).
The Finnish handset maker is closing its last store selling high-end Vertu cellphones in Ginza by the end of this month. Previously, it had four such stores in Japan, according to Tomoko Morinari of Sunny Side Up, a Tokyo public relations company that has Nokia as a client.
She declined to say when the decision to leave Japan was made or how many Vertu phones Nokia sold in Japan.
Nokia phones have never been very popular in Japan, where the market is dominated by offerings from Japanese electronics makers as well as the iPhone from Apple Inc.
Meanwhile, Nokia cut its smartphone prices in Europe by as much as 15 percent at the beginning of this month, according to analyst firm CCS Insight.
“We’ve absolutely seen the drops,” Ben Wood, a London-based analyst with CCS, said in an interview. “They’re under aggressive pressure from entry-level players and equally their customers in the channels know they’re in a strong negotiating position.”
The Espoo, Finland-based company is trying to keep up sales of its older Symbian smartphone lines as it readies the first models based on Microsoft Corp’s Windows Phone 7 software for the fourth quarter. Chief executive Stephen Elop announced the shift in February, adding that the company still expects to sell another 150 million Symbian smartphones. Nokia spokesman Doug Dawson said price cuts are routine in the company’s business and he had no comment on the reports.
“All the major houses cut prices two to six times a year, typically in small adjustments,” said Neil Mawston, a London-based analyst at Strategy Analytics. “For a company like Nokia, anything above 5 percent is an above-average adjustment. With revenue declining sharply because of unusually weak demand, they’ve got to make these large price cuts.”
During the past 10 years, Nokia’s average annual price cut has been about 9 percent, he said.
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