Nokia taps into Kenya’s apps potential

The world’s largest mobile handset manufacturer Nokia is eyeing the opportunities that exist in Kenya in the mobile application arena to scale up its product development undertakings.
Visiting Nokia President and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop told Capital Business that the country has a huge pool of talented mobile app developers that they can tap into to enhance research and development.
“Kenya is a key focal point for our research and development activities for a lot of Africa and India,” he said.
“It is the case that we have the Nokia Research Centre which is the only such facility in the continent where we make plans and designing the next generation of activities,” he added.
With that many opportunities, Capital Business sought to know why the company would downgrade the Nairobi office from a regional headquarters to a sales office.
Elop however explained that what happened last year was a conscious decision by the company to increase its investments in order to position it to capture the opportunities for growth.
“If you compare what we will be investing in Kenya and East Africa this year versus last year, you will see an increase of 25 percent. Some people have seen that we have moved people around to different locations and turned that into a negative but in fact we did that because we saw an opportunity to help people,” he said in defence of last year’s move that saw South Africa named as the new Nokia headquarters in Africa.