Mr. Josh Foulger, Head of Manufacturing Operations, Nokia visited DoMS on 12 th Feb to give a talk on various topics ranging from various popular products of Nokia to the strategic reasons behind the setting up of Nokia plant in Chennai.Mr. Josh being Head of the Manufacturing Operations and with his 10+ years of experience with Nokia was with the CMO division which looked into sales & marketing, SCM, SC solutions and manufacturing technology. He started his talk describing Nokia’s market presence and its dominance of the mobile phone market. Nokia was way ahead of its competitors like LG, Siemens, Samsung etc with a whopping 32% market share.
He then gave a brief glimpse of the various products from Nokia which were popular and which featured the latest in handset technology. He described how Nokia was structured into various Business groups (verticals) and how each of these business groups functioned as individual entities with their own separate teams for marketing, R&D etc.
He described the strategic reasons behind the Nokia plant in Chennai. Lower labour costs, and availability of resources including skilled technologists played key roles in setting up the one-year old Chennai plant. Understanding customer requirements were key in formulation of Nokia’s manufacturing strategy. Nokia gave highest priority to Quality, cost and responsiveness in manufacturing.
The Question – Answer session which took almost the same time as the whole presentation saw a volley of questions being thrown at Mr. Josh by the students of DoMS. He himself confessed at the end that the questions were thought – provoking and it was a learning experience in itself for him.
A few of the questions asked were, regarding Nokia’s supply chain, the increasing replacement phone market, potential threats from competition etc. A few budding MBA’s probed on Nokia’s strategy of phasing out certain successful products as well as Nokia’s strategy of using numbers rather than names for each of its models, the lag in the introduction of latest models in India compared to their release in other countries and the possibility of tie-ups with mobile service providers. Queries were also put in on Nokia’s HR strategy of hiring Higher Secondary School pass outs for their manufacturing operations. Mr. Josh was able to substantiate his view on the importance of the market being the driver for making decisions related to market launch and withdrawal as well as Nokia’s attempts in seeing India as a low cost producer of high quality mobile phones.
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