Indiantelevision.com Team

(9 June 2006 2:00 pm)

BANGALORE: As has become the norm in recent times for any company that wants to sell in India, Nokia India (Nokia) has announced its plans to connect to the youth, who form the largest demographic group in the country, with more on the way. The strategy is to launch initiatives in the genre of sports, music, imaging and fashion to deepen the connect to the youth.

In the sports segment, probably in line with current mania over the Football World Cup, and taking advantage of the fact that football after cricket in India is one of the most popular sports with over 55,000 registered clubs, Nokia announced the Defend Your Turf (DYT) championship.

DYT is a country level street football championship, the first round of which will target Indian citizens aged between 15 and 25 years. The regional championships will be held in Delhi, Bangalore Mumbai and Kolkatta, with the finals being held in Kolkata on 17 June for the national championship crown. DYT provides budding footballers from India to match their skills with leading Brazilian futsal players selected by the Futebol Profissional, a premiere football association of Rio de Janeiro.

To connect with the youth, Nokia has bought world class music artists including Shaggy, Mark Knopfler, Sting and Enrique Iglesias.

Nokia India MD – Customer and Marketing Operations, Devinder Kishore is quite confident that by 2010 India will stand number two in terms of size fro Nokia worldwide, up from the current number four. Their manufacturing facility in Chennai which started production in December 2005 reached a landmark one million handset production in March 2006.Globally, Nokia has the largest share of the handset pie.