During a recent partner event, Nokia’s vice president of Western Europe, Conor Pierce addressed more than 120 dealers and said that he wants Nokia to become a “disruptive force” in the handset market. Pierce said Nokia has gone from being an industry leader to a challenger. Samsung recently dethroned Nokia as the world’s top mobile phone producer this past April.

“We want to become a disruptive force in the market, but not just a reckless force landing something almighty on the market, we need to be very clever about how we do it,” Pierce explained to the attendees.

“Almost half of the UK population is aware of Lumia,” Pierce said. “Is it enough? No, it’s not. Do they consider it? Many do. Are they buying? Many do. Do enough people buy? No, they don’t. We’ll continue to drive the awareness and build the consideration through yourselves, retail and call centers.”

Pierce described his company’s partnership with Microsoft as important, but meaningless if Nokia can’t do something different. “It’s about knowing what we need to do and doing it fast, but not recklessly,” he said.

Pierce reminded the group of partners that Nokia wouldn’t become a force without their support.

“This disruptive force isn’t relevant if it isn’t relevant to you,” he said. “We can build success but that will only happen with you. We need you to be with us. It’s going to take some time to build momentum, but with your support we’ll get there.”

Nokia’s second quarter earnings revealed that the Finnish phone maker sold 4 million Lumia devices in the quarter alone, which is definitely a step in the right direction. In a separate interview with Mobile News, Adrian Williams, Nokia’s director of B2B sales for Europe said that the company has started to gain sales against Research In Motion in the business-to-business market.

Williams said Nokia has won four of RIM’s “major” contracts that will result in “thousands” of Lumia devices in the business-to-business market, according to Mobile News.

“Business customers are seeing the Lumia device range as a very strong way forward for them because the native productivity solutions come straight out of the box, such as Microsoft Office products like Word and Excel,” Williams said. “Many customers, like most businesses, will already have made significant investments into the Microsoft ecosystem. What we’re doing is opening up that investment to their mobile fleet.”

[via: Fierce Wireless, Mobile News (1) (2)]