Lesson from Nokia – For Maruti

Maruti drives past over 50% of Indian car market share in June 2017 in with slew of new car launches they seems to continue their dominant in near future. Though they are on verge of doing same mistake that Nokia did and doomed to dust.

Nokia was once market leader in Mobile handset, at pick time it was close to 62%; and their dominance was once seems eternal. I still remember my healthy arguments with my friends in mid 2010; when I said Nokia will be out market in next 2-3 years, they all laughed like I cracked a joke. But the fate was inevitable because of two reasons – No, the two reasons were not apple or android 😉
The real reason was arrogant approach of company and the leader

Arrogant company – Nokia was over confident about their position and was thinking that they cannot go wrong; they are market maker and not the other way round – they keep doing what they were good at in place of reinventing themselves.

Arrogant leader – Even after failure of Symbian OS, they didn’t embrace android, Rather the CEO (who joined from Microsoft) continue to bet on his old pal and was only building windows phones. He kept his personal view over the industry view. Samsung on the other hand was building both windows and android phone (plus their own OS), and with popularity in Galaxy series (android phone) they moved completely to Android.
Now, with government of India focusing a lot on electrical car and mandate that by 2030 all new cars on Indian road should be electrical. Many smart companies (Mahindra, Hyundai etc) already announce their intention and positive approach toward it.

While, Leaders of Maruti is claiming that – ‘Indian consumer don’t want to buy electrical car’. They are continuing with what they are good at – launching many varients in every segment with small or minor changes. The company & leaders approach are same as that of Nokia around 2010. I hope not, but they seems like another Nokia in making.