Why Nokia continues to push for US marketshare...

Nokia is still struggling to sell its Lumia Windows Phone smartphones in significant numbers, although the sales figures are slowly rising.

And one country it's finding particularly hard to crack is the United States, despite costly ad campaigns and marketing drives. In Q2 this year, the US market accounted for only 7% (500,000) of its worldwide smartphone sales.

So why does it continue to pour money into the US?

At Nokia's recent Q2 financial results call, CEO Stephen Elop, said while sales may be low, the influence of the US is huge.

Richard Kramer – Arete Research

Stephen, you have now had about eight straight quarters of about 0.5 million units or so in North America. Can you just sort of lay out for shareholders and investors, balancing the signaling value of the U.S. market, whether you can justify the cost of continuing to pursue market share there? And what might happen if that doesn’t improve?

Stephen Elop – President and Chief Executive Officer, Chairman of Nokia Leadership Team, Director

Thanks, Richard. With respect to North America, particularly the U.S. market, we believe quite strongly that the signaling value of that market is high. We measure this quite carefully by studying the influencers on purchases around the world and the extent to which for example a powerful launch of the Lumia 1020 in the United States is reflected around the world and how that gets picked up and everything from press coverage to blogger coverage to the encouragement of developers to build apps for Windows Phone and so on and so forth and it is just an amazing amount of influence coming out the U.S. market.

Now it is a hard market. At the same time, if you look sequentially, we saw improvements in North America which we are pleased to see. In large part, on the back of the 928 going into Verizon and the 520 in T-Mobile and also a number of retail markets. And, of course, we have some very exciting products. Just coming in our product in particular the Lumia 1020 which, for the first time since November, puts some freshness into AT&T as well.

So we think that that’s really important. Also the standard of care that with the U.S. operators put towards quality of products is something that helps us. Going through an AT&T lab approval cycle early on is something that helps us a great deal on a worldwide basis. So we still believe strongly that signalling value, it is a big investment. We have to do better. We have to break through. So we know there is a lot of hard work ahead but we remain committed to the Americas.

(Source: Windows Phone Now)