Today Nokia announced that it will license its brand to a new Finnish company founded by former Nokia execs. The company, Global HMD, plans to use the Nokia brand to sell Android-based phones and tablets.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, which acquired Nokia’s handset line in 2014, is selling its feature phone line to manufacturing giant Foxconn’s FIH subsidiary for $350 million. These “dumb phones” will also carry the Nokia brand; HMD will sell and market them for FIH (got that?).
Though Nokia won’t be making the phones itself, the HMD deal marks a major return for the Nokia name. Nokia exited the phone business altogether after its $7 billion deal with Microsoft. Needless to say, the acquisition did not launch Microsoft into the upper tier of mobile phone makers. The tech giant retired the Nokia brand and eventually wrote the whole sale off as a massive loss.
Since selling its phone business, Nokia itself has mostly focused on the lucrative telecommunications infrastructure market, buying competitor Alcatel-Lucent earlier this year for $16.6 billion. But the company hasn’t given up on electronics entirely. Its Nokia Technologies division makes an Android-based tablet for the Chinese market. And last month the company acquired French gadget maker Withings in deal that signaled Nokia’s ambitions to get back into consumer electronics were on the rise.
In the meantime, Nokia’s focus on telecommunications gear seems to be working out well. But the brand has been out of the public eye for a while. The HMD deal could change that. If not, it won’t have cost Nokia much, at least compared to the Alcatel-Lucent buy. Think of getting back into phones as Nokia hedging its bets.
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