Hi,

So after asking a couple of times and waiting patiently for my Forum Nokia Champion blog it turns out I've had one for ages and didn't realise!

Since Nokia have very kindly made me "Champion of the Month" I thought I'd better start blogging.  What better way to start than by sharing Nokia's success.

For the fourth quarter of 2007 Nokia sold more than 40% of all mobile phones!  That's an astonishing number and had been a target for Nokia for many years.  It's interesting that now they've shifted their focus toward being an internet company and service provider as well as a handset manufacturer they finally acheive the result they always wanted.

Here's the breakdown of the numbers from Strategy Analytics (yes, it's not just a Nokia internal number) for those who are interested:

You can see that most of the gains for Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson & LG have come at the expense of Motorola - who seem to have really lost their way at the end of last year.

The other interesting thing to note is that the mobile phone market is still growing strongly despite the worsening global economic situation.  In fact there are now half as many mobile phone subscriptions as there are people on the planet (of course that doesn't mean half the world has a mobile subscription - lots of people have more than one).  That link goes to Tomi Ahonen's blog and it's well worth a read.  The growth of spending on mobile services is truly staggering.  In 2007 the Value-Add Services content revenues for mobiles globally was $45 billion.  Lets hope an increasing fraction of that revenue goes on mobile applications over the next few years!

So to finish I'd like to say congratulations to the global giant that is Nokia and good luck for 2008 to all those that share the vision of a mobile connected world.

Mark