Operators Won’t Sell Nokia Lumias–Even in Finland!
MTV3 the Finnish TV broadcaster and news service ran a secret test of the Finnish handset retailers in the Helsinki and Tampere regions the two largest cities of Finland. They sampled two stores from each of the three mobile carriers/operators, and two stores from the two largest independent phone resellers. The MTV3 journalists pretended to be normal consumers and visited ten stores and every time asked to see Nokia Lumia smartphones. In six out of ten stores, the sales people showed only rival phones Androids mostly by Samsung when the consumer asked for Nokia Lumia !!! In another two cases the sales person came with several phones rather than just the Lumia and offered immediately a series of handsets to compare. Only in two cases out of ten, did the sales person show a Lumia on first request. Every store had the Lumia on display and in stock and the news story makes the point, that in most stores Lumia had the biggest sales displays at prominent places.
Tomi Ahonen, as usual, is spot on in his analysis of Nokia. This passage is buried pretty deep into his several thousand word posting, but it pretty much summarizes how Nokia is doing in their transition to a Windows Phone device manufacturer–namely, not good.
If they’re having that much trouble getting the operator stores to sell Nokia Lumia phones in Finland, where they’ve historically had over 85% of the the market, imagine how bad it is elsewhere.
