By Waseem Afzal

Due to the current economic slowdown, there are few industries that have been left unaffected. One of the hardest hit has been the makers of cell phones and handsets. These companies are not only suffering from a sharp decrease in demand, but they have also been hit with rising material costs. Since Sim free mobile phones have many components that are made out of petroleum and oil prices have been on the rise, it is not surprising that product costs have gone up over the past year.

Over the past several months, the leader in cell phone sales has been Nokia. Nokia has recently reported a sixty-six percent decrease in profits. This stunning information also revealed that sales have dropped off by more than twenty-five percent from what it was during the same time the previous year. This is not a problem that only Nokia has experienced as its competitors such as Ericsson, Sanyo and Samsung are also experiencing very sharp declines.

The one bright spot on the books for Nokia was their sales of smart phones. According to the company, Nokia was able to expand it market share and sell more smart phones than ever. While the company expects the sales of smart phones to remain steady or even increase, they are not expecting a sudden rebound in sales of their traditional Sim free mobile phones. According to most expects, as long as the global recession continues, consumers will be willing to hold onto their old Sim free mobile phones rather than replacing them with a newer, flashier models.

Should customers expect to see any special deals or price reductions?

Thanks in large part to the significant drop off in sales figures, cell phone manufacturers have opted to become more desperate. Some of these manufacturers are not looking at expanding their market. They are looking at simple survival. Despite being a market leader, Nokia has decided to completely avoid looking at plans for significant market expansion. Currently, the company is hoping to remain the leader of the current depressed industry. Despite the fact that there are prices the Sim free mobile phone can not decline beyond, it is possible that prices will continue to slowly be reduced as the economic slowdown expands across the globe.

In a plan to increase sales, Nokia has been strong-armed to reduce the price of traditional products such as handsets. Surprisingly, the traditional price of the average Nokia handset was reduced from $104 last year to roughly $88. Despite its lower price, Nokia saw sales of fewer than fifteen percent fewer devices this year than what the figures were well over 12 months ago. Thanks to a problematic economic environment, corporations have little choice but to reduce prices in a last gasp attempt to maintain sales volume stability or, at least, to a point that is nearly stable.

Producers of Sim mobile phones are also realize the trend in mobile phones is departing from traditional cell phones and heading in the direction of devices along the lines of smartphone and Iphone models that provide proper custom content. However, it is no secret that the business will still rely on the sale of traditional mobile phones in order to keep the phone sales somewhat consistent.

Going forward, it is difficult to predict exactly was kind of prices or deals customers can expect. It is a simple economic reality that if the recession continues, mobile phone manufacturers will be forced to cut prices to deal with falling demand.

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