Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone vendor by volume, expects sales of multimedia handsets in China's replacement market to help stabilise the selling price of its products, which have been under pressure from cheaper rivals.
Nokia's third-quarter results showed the number of mobile devices it sold in China was up 87 per cent, to 8.5 million, from a year ago.
Despite the strong figures, the average selling price of its products fell to Euro102 ($954) from Euro108 a year ago and it is braced for further price pressure from low-end products.
But senior Nokia staff said the firm is betting on the replacement market in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai to strengthen pricing.
'Although new users are all using low-end mobile phones and this contributed to the lower average selling price, we plan to focus on the high-end market as users begin to change their phones for newer phones with a greater multimedia function,' said Dan Wong, Nokia China's vice-president of multimedia business.
He said local handset vendors were beginning to lose market share to international vendors as handsets became more complex.
