This summer, Nokia once again became the top seller in Russia’s mobile phone market after several consecutive years of less than stellar performance and a year after it scrapped plans to develop a single-brand retail network in Russia.
Leading mobile phone retailer Euroset found that in the summer months, Nokia’s share in the Russia’s handset market inched up two percentage points in comparison to the spring to reach 29%, while its archrival, Samsung, shed three points to end up with 27%.
The Finnish firm overtook the Koreans in low-end handsets priced $50-to-100 apiece.
In an exchange with the Russian business daily Vedomosti, Viktor Lukanin, the vice president for commerce at Euroset, said that it was Nokia’s low prices that helped the company outdistance competitors.
While the average handset price in Russia’s market grew by more than 14% over the summer, the average Nokia phone price fell by almost 16%.
Most market analysts attributed Nokia’s win to flexible pricing of the Lumia, its flagship smartphone, and to the popularity of the Asha, a budget device. Others believed that using Windows Phone, an OS that has been recently gaining appeal in Russia, was another driver.
Nokia and Samsung have been almost neck and neck on the Russian market since 2011. On the global market, however, Nokia has been steadily losing out. According to Gartner, in the Q2 2013 the Finnish vendor slipped to just a 14% market share from 19.9% a year before, leaving Samsung the indisputable leader with a 24.7% market share.
