In order to tap the growing outsourcing boom to India, the world’s largest cellphone maker Nokia has decided to shift its managed services business to Chennai from Finland from next month.Ashish Chowdhary, currently the Country Head for Networks in India, will also take over as the new global head of managed services by the end of the year, the company said.The managed services division provides operations, maintenance and day-to-day management of network to the wireless phone operators across the world on a day-to-day basis. By shifting it to the Chennai, the Finnish company will cut costs drastically while providing employment to Indian engineers in Chennai.‘‘The move underscores Nokia’s commitment to tap global services market growth, as well as India’s outstanding outsourcing ecosystem and innovation pedigree,’’ said Rajeev Suri, Senior Vice President with Nokia.Nokia also said it extended a 5-year services deal with India’s Hutchison Essar Ltd, the Indian wireless operation of Hong Kong’s Hutchison Telecommunications International Ltd. It will take over 200 staff and operations in 10 new areas. This means Nokia will supply equipment and manage the networks for 19 of 23 areas for Hutchison Essar. To date, Nokia has 39 managed services contracts in 30 countries.This move will help Hutch to cut its costs as they are outsourcing their entire maintenance of network to Nokia. Nokia is eyeing similar deals with other cell phone services providers in India.Services represented over 30% of Nokia Networks’ 2005 revenues of 6.6 billion euros, and the firm expects revenue from services to grow to 40% this year. Nokia’s January-March earnings and sales were well above all expectations, boosted by strong growth in the phone market. Five new modelsIn the ongoing Asia Pacific meet of its corporate customers here today, Nokia also unveiled five new mobile handsets, including a 3G camera phone and two CDMA phones, that should hit retail shelves this year. The company wants cost of acquiring a phone to become less than $5 so that it can tap the lower income customers of the emerging markets. Nokia, which sells more than one in three of all mobiles, increased its market share, but rival Motorola Inc reported even faster sales growth, boosted by the ultra-thin clamshell RAZR model. In the first quarter, Nokia had a global market share of 32.8%, compared with second-ranked Motorola with 20.1%. The company predicted that three billion handsets will be sold by 2008 as compared to 2.2 billion sold in 2005.
