THE FRIDAY INTERVIEWwith Alan O'Hara, general manager of Nokia Ireland
NOT MANY 35-year-olds are at the helm of a local company that turned over €235 million in 2006 with a pretax profit of €4.8 million. Alan O'Hara, general manager of Nokia Ireland, has been the Finnish mobile phone company's man in Ireland since February this year.
Despite his relative youth, the self-confessed "bean counter" would probably be the first to admit that he's a relatively safe pair of hands. After qualifying as an accountant, he cut his teeth in the technology industry with Microsoft, where he worked for five years. He joined the software giant as a business analyst and left as IT controller.
"The next step for me was to either go to Seattle or jump," O'Hara recalls.
He decided to jump and, after a brief but eventful spell with a start-up during the tech boom at the start of the decade, he joined Nokia Ireland, where he has worked for the last six years.
"The reason I was attracted by Nokia was that, even though I am a bean-counter by trade, it was the commercial aspect of the business I really wanted to get into."
At that time, Nokia had five staff in Ireland, operated out of a serviced office and had an ethos of "if you can get them, sell them".
In those days, Ireland was at the end of the mobile phone supply chain and local consumers had to wait months before the latest handsets were available through official channels. O'Hara says supply has been one of the issues on which he has focused - ensuring new products get into Irish shops as quickly as possible.
He has spent the first couple of months in the driving seat carrying out an internal reorganisation to streamline the supply chain but also to support Nokia's global move into services as well as hardware sales. The world's largest mobile-phone maker is betting that by providing music, maps and games directly to purchasers of its phones, it can offset slowing handset sales in mature markets with ongoing service revenues.
"We can launch a device, but if the platform is not there to share it, it's always a challenge," says O'Hara. "I think it's important that when you do launch something to the market that it works. It needs to walk out of the box working for the consumer."
It's with its music plans that Nokia is most advanced locally. Having concluded deals with record labels big and small, the Nokia Music Store Ireland provides access to three million tracks that can be streamed directly to a phone on the move.
O'Hara believes this initiative could be the "start of something big" and although he finds it frustrating that the company had to negotiate deals at a country level rather than across Europe, he says the music industry has been hugely supportive.
Surely moving into services, though, which were traditionally the domain of network operators, puts Nokia into conflict with some of the largest buyers of handsets.
"I think it complements what the operators are doing and, at the end of the day, it's driving traffic across their network."
The vast bulk of mobile phones here are still sold at retail with the mobile operator paying a healthy subsidy to reduce the cost to the end-user. Although it doesn't sell directly to the end-user, O'Hara says Nokia invests heavily to ensure it knows what they want.
"We spend and invest an awful lot of money on customer focus groups. We've got a retail field force on the ground and I visit retailers as well to get feedback," he says. "At the end of the day, if it's happening at retail you need to know about it and you need to know about it now."
As with many other products, Irish shoppers often feel aggrieved that they pay more for mobile phones than their British counterparts. Is that something that is likely to change?
"That's probably a question for the operator because you are looking at subsidised retail prices," O'Hara says. "You need to look at market size, revenue per user, the length of the contracts, all that kind of stuff. There are a lot of different parameters that come into play."
One parameter that is likely to change is the number of operators playing in the local market. Tesco Mobile was the first virtual operator when it launched last year but more consumer brands are likely to follow its lead.
"At the moment we have four operators here fighting for a set base," says O'Hara. "To be honest I think there is space for them and we are going to see more of them. It's a challenging business environment with the penetration that we have, but I think there is a space for virtual operators here."
Currently there are over five million active mobile phone subscriptions in the Republic. That's a real challenge for a company trying to grow its sales.
"I'm not talking the helm of the Nokia ship at the start of the growth," admits O'Hara. "But do I see growth in the market? Yes, I do. That's evidenced in other manufacturers entering the market and taking it seriously."
Samsung in particular has been most vocal about its intention to go after Nokia's market lead. Industry sources suggest Nokia has over 60 per cent of the local market.
Unlike others in the industry, O'Hara resists the temptation to have a swipe at his newest competitor - Apple's sleek iPhone.
"I think the iPhone is an amazing piece of kit," says O'Hara. "It's the first dip that Apple have taken into the mobile handset market. I think it's given the industry an injection. It's shaken up a few manufacturers and raised the bar."
Sales of the N95, Nokia's all-singing answer to the iPhone, have been "very strong", he adds, and buyers seem to be using the additional services it offers such as e-mail, navigation and music.
Although he is firmly immersed in the mobile business, he doesn't see that much difference between Nokia, the century-old European company and Microsoft, the young US firm which decimated established competitors.
"Nokia was making Wellingtons, paper and all that kind of stuff 100 years ago," says O'Hara. "It's only been in mobile phones since the mid-1980s. It's got a lot of heritage, but it's a young and vibrant company as well."
While Microsoft employs almost 2,000 directly and indirectly in the Republic, the local Nokia operations could never be accused of being overweight. The company employs just 16 people directly. It outsources customer care, field marketing and uses five distributors to get the product into shop. Phones for the Irish market are built to order at factories in eastern Europe and Finland.
The lean model means the Irish business has produced "solid numbers", although O'Hara won't get into market share figures citing commercial sensitivities. "I want a situation where we have success, not just in terms of numbers but in terms of customer experience," concludes O'Hara. "You can't have one without the other."
