HELSINKI/SEATTLE: Two years after hitching its fate to Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, Nokia collapsed into the arms of the US software giant yesterday, agreeing to sell its main handset business for ¤5.44bn ($7.2bn).
Nokia, once the world’s dominant handset maker, has failed to close a yawning lead opened up by Apple and Samsung in the highly competitive market for smartphones and will now concentrate on its networking equipment unit, navigation business and technology patents.
Nokia’s Canadian boss Stephen Elop, who ran Microsoft’s business software division before jumping to Nokia in 2010, will return to the US firm as head of its mobile devices business — a Trojan horse, according to disgruntled Finnish media.
He is being discussed as a possible replacement for Microsoft’s retiring CEO Steve Ballmer, who is trying to remake the U.S. firm into a gadget and services company like Apple before he departs, though it has fallen short so far in its attempts to compete in mobile devices.
“It’s very clear to me that rationally this is the right step going forward,” Elop told reporters, though he added he also felt “a great deal of sadness” over the outcome. “I feel sadness because inevitably we are changing Nokia and what it stands for,” he said.
In 2011, after writing a memo that said Nokia lacked the in-house technology and needed to jump off a “burning platform”, Elop made the controversial decision to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone for smartphones, rather than Nokia’s own software or Google’s ubiquitous Android operating system.
Reuters
