'Nokia chose wrong markets, BlackBerry failed to adapt’: Ex-Nokia CEO on why mobile giants collapsed

Shiv Shivakumar, Group Executive President for Corporate Strategy & Business Development at the Aditya Birla Group and former CEO of Nokia (Emerging Markets) and PepsiCo, has explained why once-dominant mobile phone brands Nokia and BlackBerry disappeared from the market.

Speaking on a podcast with Raj Shamani, Shivakumar said the two companies failed for very different reasons.

According to him, Nokia’s downfall stemmed from a critical strategic error. “Nokia made a mistake of choosing Windows against Android. It was a strategic mistake. Wrong decision by the CEO and the board. They suffered,” he said, pointing to the operating system choice as the defining factor in the company’s decline.

BlackBerry, on the other hand, had a strong product but failed to recognise how consumer behaviour was changing. “BlackBerry was really blind. The biggest use on the phone today is WhatsApp. BlackBerry had that as BBM. They did nothing with it. They were actually the first to have WhatsApp. They had the product, but they couldn’t scale it or anticipate the consumer trends,” Shivakumar said.

He traced BlackBerry’s early success to its dominance in secure email services, which made the device indispensable for professionals such as lawyers and stockbrokers who relied on real-time communication. However, competitors soon closed the gap.

“In about three to four years, companies like Nokia and Apple offered email capabilities as good as BlackBerry’s. But BlackBerry continued to think its success was solely about email. That was the mistake,” he said.

Shivakumar added that even high-profile endorsements failed to change the company’s trajectory. “Barack Obama had a BlackBerry, and that 50 million coverage we got was enough, but focusing on past successes rather than evolving consumer needs was a fatal error.”

One area where BlackBerry held an unmatched advantage was its messaging service, BBM. Shivakumar described it as a pioneer of private, one-to-one social communication—essentially an early version of WhatsApp.

“People loved BBM at 100%. In Saudi Arabia, girls would put BBM codes on their hand and show it to boys going by. It was a great way to connect,” he said. Despite its popularity, BlackBerry failed to expand BBM into a broader communication or social platform, ultimately losing the opportunity to dominate the global messaging market.