Nokia Wants to Bring 3 Billion More Online

Stephen Elop, Nokia’s chief executive, said the company would also continue to use its scale and footprint to capitalize on the other end of the spectrum in the smartphone industry — by focusing on developing markets where a large portion of the population is not yet using the mobile Web.

“We want to bring the next billion online,” said Mr. Elop, speaking in a keynote address at the Mobile World Congress here. “We can connect the unconnected.” Elop said that 80 percent of the world’s population lives within range of cellphone coverage but that only 20 percent or so is connected to the Internet. Nokia, he said, can bring them online through mobile Internet on cellphones. He said as many as three billion more people around the world could potentially come online through a cellphone. Nokia already has a foothold in many of these markets. Each day, Mr. Elop said, Nokia ships more than one million of its lower-end handsets, the Series 30 and Series 40. But the key to tapping into the rest of that nascent market, he said, is “going beyond just voice and SMS connections on mobile devices.”