Nokia Is Bad News for Motorola

The news for Motorola's cell phone business has been pretty bad lately -- bad enough that Moto might even pin off the unit. But there's even more trouble ahead. Nokia, the biggest global cell phone player, sounds like it's finally going to get serious about the U.S. market. Moto is strongest in the U.S.; Nokia has barely made a dent here.

I had a conversation with Nokia's president, Mark Louison, in January, and he laid out Nokia's methodical plan to carve out U.S. market share a few percentage points at a time. "We want to be the market leader in North America," he says. "It will take a multi-year effort to get there."

Nokia's plan doesn't seem to rely much on magic -- just on brute force. It has the R&D budget to crank out more new handset models than anybody else, and the scale to make them more cheaply than jut about anyone else, he notes. Nokia has done almost no U.S. consumer marketing and has not done a great job courting U.S. carriers, but Louison suggests that both will change in 2008.

Nokia is also moving in some interesting new directions. It will be coming out with Wi-Max handheld devices to try to take advantage of roll-outs by Sprint Nextel and others. Nokia operates an iTunes-like online music store in Europe and will probably be bringing that to the U.S. as a way to feed songs to a growing line of Nokia music phones.

Talking to Louison, I got the feeling Nokia smells Motorola's weakness and is anxious to exploit it.

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