Nokia plans possible comeback to cellphone business

The Finnish company says it hopes to return to designing and providing technology for cellphones but needs a partner to manufacture, market and sell the devices.

Nokia’s release of the N1 tablet previous year gave a clear indication of how any mobile manufacturing partnership might work.

Whether Nokia could indeed differentiate itself in the increasingly challenging Android smartphone space also remains to be demonstrated.

“The right path back to mobile phones for Nokia is through a brand-licensing model”, Morlino points says. “That means identifying a partner that can be responsible for all of the manufacturing, sales, marketing and customer support for a product”, said Robert Morlino, a spokesman for Nokia Technologies.

So, instead of pouring in a lot of money in creating new marketing and distribution channels, as well as manufacturing lines for producing and selling its future smartphones, Nokia is now looking for a partner that will be in charge with all these aspects. A year and a half is a long time in mobile, however, and it’s hard to imagine the market being swept up by the resurrection of the Nokia handset brand in 2017. According to Nokia, we will definitely not see any new Nokia-branded phones being released before the fourth quarter of 2016 (this being part of the agreement with Microsoft).

With so many ex-Nokia workers affected by the redundancies, Nokia’s Finnish homeland will soon have a great deal of unemployed mobile talent.

However with Microsoft preferring to use the “Lumia” brand for its smart devices and widespread cuts in its mobile division, Nokia could sense an opportunity.

“The answer is: it’s complicated”, he continued, noting the current Nokia is dedicated to developing the businesses it retained following the Microsoft sale, namely its mobile network equipment, HERE maps and technology development and licensing units. However, we’ll do it in a completely different way from before. Licensing is an understandable strategy: while the Nokia brand won’t regain its position at the cutting edge, it will at least live on.