Dr. Walid Moneimne

'Nokia has four divisions - mobile phones, multimedia and games, enterprise solutions and networks,' explains Dr. Walid Moneimne, Senior Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa who is well known in the Middle East as the former head of Dell and was previously a senior executive with Compaq/HP for many years.

'I was very happy to get the opportunity to move into this exciting new field which meant a significant enhancement of responsibility,' he says. 'But it was really a development of my 20 years in IT, as this is part of the digital convergence phenomenon in telecommunications, IT and consumer electronics.

'Nokia Networks has 80 networks running in the world covering 120 countries, and has a big market share in 3G. Out of 66 licenses issued we have 43 of which 19 are confirmed orders.'

'Only last week Nokia won the extension of 3G in Bahrain. We are also present in Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Pakistan and Iran. And we have major operations in Saudi Arabia and Dubai.'

Across the Middle East and North Africa the market for mobile phone networks, including equipment, services and operations, is worth $3-4 billion a year, compared with $40 billion worldwide.

'The advantage Nokia can offer is end-to-end mobility,' explains Dr. Moneimne. 'By which I mean that Nokia is big in all the sectors from handsets through to the most complicated network solutions.

'Another differentiator is that we are driven by research and development, and so have the strongest portfolio of products. Then there is our value-added deployment and guarantee of quality.'

There is no doubt that mobile telephony continues to be a boom business worldwide. Already there are more mobile phones around the world than land lines, and Nokia expects mobile handset subscriptions to grow from 1.2 to two billion over the next two years.

That will take total revenues for mobile services from $500 billion to $750 billion over the same timeframe with the share of data services revenue advancing from 13% to 29%.

'Of course in the Middle East some countries still have a mobile phone penetration rate of two per cent, so that gives us plenty to work on,' says Dr. Moneimne . 'We see a lot of potential for growth in both GSM and 3G networks.'