Orascom marks Nokia's most important Ovi deal
Published: 29 October, 2008
Although 3 UK confirmed this week that it would offer Nokia's Comes With Music unlimited downloads service, tied to its first touchscreen handset, in general the Finnish giant is having difficulties convincing its traditional cellco partners to support its range of Ovi web services, because of potential conflicts with the operators' own brands and applications. But there are no such dilemmas for carriers in emerging markets, where Nokia is increasingly focusing the launches of key handsets like its XpressMusic 5800 touchscreen. And now, it signed a highly significant deal with one of the most rapidly growing telcos in new mobile territories, Egypt-based Orascom.
Orascom, which is expanding rapidly in its bid to create a multinational wireless super-carrier in the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean, plans to offer Nokia's Ovi portal and web services across its whole subscriber base. Included in the deal are Nokia Maps, Nokia N-Gage games and music applications.
Orascom joins 3, Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Telenor, TIM and Vodafone in supporting Ovi from its decks and homescreens. It could be a very important partner for Nokia. Internet services are vital in rapidly growing markets to attract middle class subscribers - who may not be able to gain broadband services over wirelines - and these are important to balance the need to offer low cost tariffs and devices to lower income groups. Such partnerships, then, are ideal to drive Nokia's devices, with their increasingly tightly integrated applications, into new user bases.
Orascom and its affiliates control almost 100m mobile connections worldwide, as of the second quarter of this year, mainly based on GSM/EDGE, but with rapid expansion of 3G and WiMAX too.
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