Nokia to Design Phones in 2016 when Microsoft Agreement Allows

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Remember that old Nokia ringtone that you used to hear everywhere? It might be back next year because Nokia is coming back into the mobile phone market, even if it's just design work. I'm still waiting for that Matrix auto-opening slide phone, Nokia!

Nokia, once the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, plans to start designing and licensing handsets again once an agreement with partner Microsoft allows it to in 2016, its chief executive told Germany's Manager Magazin. "We will look for suitable partners," Rajeev Suri said in an interview published on Thursday. "Microsoft makes mobile phones. We would simply design them and then make the brand name available to license.
 
Seems odd but if it works out for them then great. You have a cell phone division, you can't make money from it so you sell it off. Then you turn around and recreate the cell phone division.
 
Seems odd but if it works out for them then great. You have a cell phone division, you can't make money from it so you sell it off. Then you turn around and recreate the cell phone division.

Nokia isn't getting back into making phones, They are just going to design and license Nokia branded phones to 3rd parties.
 
Expect to see a bunch of cheap chinese phones with "Nokia" stamped on the front. The Nokia that made all those great phones is now part of Microsoft. Only the name remains.
 
Nokia isn't getting back into making phones, They are just going to design and license Nokia branded phones to 3rd parties.

Which is getting back into making phones by working around the buyout terms. And it'll be egg on Microsoft's face when the new Nokia phones outsell Winphone, fitting justice for Elop and friends gutting the company with mass layoffs after they lied to the Finnish government that they wouldn't.

It's total comedy.
 
Right, and since Microsoft bought all their manufacturing (and a large part of the tech teams), they'll have to rebuild that from the ground-up.

So no, Nokia is not exactly back at the same place as they were in 2012.
 
Right, and since Microsoft bought all their manufacturing (and a large part of the tech teams), they'll have to rebuild that from the ground-up.

And for now they're not trying to do that. That aren't getting back into the handset manufacturing business. Only the design and licensing. Much lower overhead and pretty impossible to lose money doing only pure IP work.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if the Finnish heavily subsidize them and get them back into the game eventually.

What manufacturing did Nokia have that was worth anything? The whole end of their time was pretty much them giving up and outsourcing manufacturing to China because they couldn't compete with Asian manufacturing.

Also WTF was MS thinking allowing them back into the game in only 2016? By 2016 MS will not have produced a single high end "Nokia" windows phone yet and Nokia will already be allowed to come back in.
 
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