Nokia Pulls The Plug
Friday, June 23, 2006
IT Business has an in depth article on Nokia pulling out of the CDMA market. Its will only outsource CDMA handsets from the Chinese and Tiwanese ODM's to maintain a presence in these markets. The official reason being that the market is not big enough to make any money. This is the latest in the feud between Nokia and Qualcomm over CDMA licenses and comes within a short time after the Nokia-Siemens Network Equipment merger deal.An interesting quote from the article.
If nothing else, this development validates a prediction made by a Cisco vice-president to one of our editors two years ago that within five years, you won’t see a CDMA handset on the market
Even CNet paints a gloomy scenario for CDMA. But can a technology simply vanish? With Nokia pulling out, it still leaves only a few players in the field, LG, Samsung and the South Asian ODM's. The markets in North America have already saturated and in the emerging markets CDMA has lost out to GSM at the price point. Even operators are moving away from CDMA, the latest being Reliance.
Maybe Verizon has seen it all coming. Its betting everything on EVDO Rev A and VoIP now.
Update: Qualcomm alleviates the doubts.
Tags: Nokia CDMA Sanyo QC IPR Licensing GSM Reliance Verizon EVDO
