Is fallen mobile giant planning a return to the Smartphone business? Yesterday, the Finnish company announced that it was seeking a "world-class" partner to licence its brand name to. The company wants the partner to handle the manufacturing, sales, marketing, and customer support for whatever new device they come up with.
In a statement on the company's official website, spokesman Roberto Morlino detailed their plans:
"The right path back to mobile phones for Nokia is through a brand-licensing model. That means identifying a partner that can be responsible for all of the manufacturing, sales, marketing and customer support for a product.
If and when we find a world-class partner who can take on those responsibilities, we would work closely with them to guide the design and technology differentiation, as we did with the Nokia N1 Android tablet. That's the only way the bar would be met for a mobile device we'd be proud to have bear the Nokia brand, and that people will love to buy."
Morlino goes on to mention that any new Nokia device will hit stores shelves during the 4th quarter of 2016 at the earliest, which is when their agreement with Microsoft ends:
To summarize, we will look for the right partner who can take on the heavy lifting and work closely with us to deliver a great product. As we agreed with Microsoft, the soonest that could happen is Q4 2016 -- so it's safe to say Nokia won't be back (at least in phone form...) before then.
Nokia sold their slumping mobile business to tech giant Microsoft last year in a deal worth around $7.5 billion dollars.
Once the dominant force in the cell phone world, the company saw their market share erode with the coming of devices like Apple's iPhone and Google's Android powered devices.