We Go For Fundamentals

HMD Global CEO on why India is core to Nokia’s growth and exploiting the online medium to cater to millennials.

- Rajiv Singh

Florian Seiche, chief executive officer of HMD Global, the Finnish company with a licence to sell Nokia-branded phones, reckons he knows the code to crack the second biggest smartphone market in the world: A dedicated India approach. On his third visit to the country since last October, Seiche is not only betting big on Nokia’s online strategy to increase its market share, he is also sharpening Nokia’s aggressive pricing play. What the former co-founder of HTC’s smartphone business is also doing is looking beyond nostalgia marketing. “If you take India as a single country, then it is already the single biggest country for us,” he tells Forbes India in an exclusive interview. Excerpts:

Q How has India grown for Nokia since your first visit here last October?

India has done really well in the last 10 months, and things have moved drastically since I first came here. India is important to us, very important. I will be here more often. It’s a key market already. It’s already one of our biggest markets. But if we look at the future, then definitely India is core to our growth.

An indicator about how crucial India is for us is to see where it is in terms of size. We divide the world into eight regions, and India happens to be one of the regions.

The only region bigger than India is Europe, with all its countries together. But if you take India as a single country, then it is already the biggest single country for us today.

Q Are you looking at India as a value market or a volume churner?