Sony Ericsson Battles Nokia For Nigeria.

[Madonna]

In the next couple of months, it will definitely be a battle royale between sony Ericsson and world number one handsets manufacturer, Nokia over who controls the mobile phone market in Nigeria.
Nokia held it's first fashion show where it introduced its line of fashion phones called the ''L ' Ammour collection'' months back. To underscore its desire to capture the heart of Nigerians for good and possibly make up for its late official entry into the market, Nokia has continued to ship in handsets manufactured specially for the Nigerian market. These models of handsets come with user interface with three major Nigerian languages , igbo, Hausa and Yoruba. They also have user manuals in local languages.
Nokia also went ahead to open the Nokia store'' at lekki lagos which is the first of it's kind in Africa.
Ericsson is set to take the battle to them.
True to its ambition, sony Ericsson is fast making statement with its models of handsets. The brand has a world wide standard of manufacturing advanced phones.
Perhaps what many don't know in Nigeria is that sony Ericsson inroduced Bluetooth technology, which has since been incorporated by other handset brands including Nokia.

[Yago]

No body should ever count Motorola out because in the states here, they are almost leading with the RaZR line of phone. I believe sooner than later, they will strike in Nigeria.

The following is from Money magazine:
"According to independent research firm ABI Research, mobile handset makers shipped nearly one billion handsets in 2006, up 23% from 2005. For 2007, A.G. Edwards analyst David Wong expects growth in the handset market to be in the 15% to 20% range. There are now some 2.5 billion mobile phone subscribers — that's roughly one out of every three people on the planet. As handset makers see it, that's just a drop in the bucket. "The big emphasis right now is capturing the next two billion global subscribers in the market," says Stuart Carlaw, research director for the wireless group at ABI.
All eyes are on emerging markets such as China and India, which are fueling tremendous growth in handset shipments and should continue to do so throughout 2007. Sony Ericsson, the No. 4 handset maker, unveiled four new phones Tuesday that are geared to these markets. (Sony Ericsson is a joint venture of Japan's Sony (SNE: 49.10, +0.73, +1.5%) and Sweden's Ericsson (ERIC: 36.44, -0.91, -2.4%).) In November, Motorola announced a stripped-down candy bar phone called the MOTOFONE that costs less than $40. However, producing phones that sell for under $60 makes it much harder to turn a profit. Generally, only companies large enough to exercise economies of scale are going to see any real returns.

On the other end of the spectrum there's the high-end phone market. Carlaw says we can expect to see a lot of new features popping up in phones that go beyond music players. Look out for an increasing number of location-based services using global positioning satellite, or GPS, and for Wi-Fi wireless Internet connectivity to become more ubiquitous. These feature-heavy phones will ring in better profits for the handset makers that excel in the space."
Nokia

Nokia may have missed the whole skinny-phone craze — a la Motorola's RAZR — but it's obviously doing something right.
Motorola

Motorola, second only to Nokia in handset market share, may serve as a cautionary tale for investors. It gained a leading edge in the high-end phone market after it released the RAZR in 2004. But as seen in the company's latest quarterly earnings announcement, the RAZR's success has come back to haunt it.