Nokia Pursues Return to Smartphone Market with Bevy of New Hires

As the company and its CEO have said in the past, the company plans to do things differently the second time around. However, he has to wait until the latter part of 2016 before he is able to re-enter the handset business due to a non-compete clause signed with Microsoft that does not expire until then.

The company has tried its luck with the formula already, releasing the N1 Android tablet in January, and an Android app called Z Launcher, which organized content on smartphones.

A few days ago, it unveiled a virtual-reality camera.

Meanwhile, a number of job openings have popped up for Nokia’s technologies division on LinkedIn, with many of these jobs being in product development and some of them being for Android engineers for Nokia devices.

Nokia has one of the mobile industry’s biggest troves of intellectual property, including patents it retained after selling its handset business.

Nokia is expected to receive a timely boost when it completes the purchase of Alcatel-Lucent for $15.6 billion, in a deal announced in April.

Nokia did a similar deal with N1 tablet. Nokia says that it will not repeat its past mistakes in missing industry trends. “Instead, the new Nokia handsets will most likely be operating at the low-cost end of the market, mainly in emerging markets, such as Africa, Latin American, the Middle East and Asia”.

The firm is reportedly hiring software experts, testing new products and looking for sales partners to launch itself back into the market.

With advances in contract manufacturing and standardisation of software, components and features like touch-screens, it is also easier than ever for companies to outsource everything to produce lookalike phones.

“They want to be innovative and seen as a company with long-term vision in the (tech) industry and having a foot in devices plays into this impression, even if it’s not bringing massive revenue at the outset”, said Sylvain Fabre, an analyst at Gartner in an interview with Reuters.