Finnish mobile maker Nokia is set to diversify, looking beyond its core sector of mobile phones to transform itself into a fully-fledged digital services company.

To achieve this aim, the company has made 12 acquisitions in the past year and hired over 700 top executives from companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Apple, said, Niklas Savander, Nokia executive VP for services and software.

Savander said, "Hardware is no longer enough. Today, customers are looking for services, and digital services are going to the frontier for us."

The company, apart from manufacturing handsets, already provides internet services such as music and games downloads, maps and other location based services, messaging and other media offerings.

Savander explained the logic behind the transformation, saying that only 25 per cent of the global population has an email address. "We have the opportunity to become the company that will enable people to have their first email address on the handset," he said.
 
The company demonstrated mail on Ovi, allowing even customers with low and mid-range handsets to access mail. The company plans to add such applications to 400 million handsets over the next two years.

Having estimated that each handset has an average of 100 contacts, the company aims at having world’s largest ever social connected network.

Nokia’s music store is currently present in 12 countries across three continents, and is expanding. Its map service is available in 200 countries. Savander said, "We will ship 300 million phones with GPS by 2010, and our offerings will be different from the maps available on the internet. The key differentiator is that online sites will provide maps, we will index it to connect people to places. This is a tremendous business opportunity for us."  X

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