It’s Back

Finland’s HMD Global gets Nokia mobile devices back on stage.

Finland’s HMD Global gets Nokia mobile devices back on stage

OSTALGIA hung heavy at the re-launch of the once-ubiquitous Nokia 3310 in May. With many new features and marketed by a different company, HMD Global Oy, it was not quite the same model that had taken the country by storm in the early 2000s, but the look and feel were similar, and that was all that mattered. “It is not a comeback as Nokia never left India,” says Arto Nummela, CEO, HMD Global. “Nokia branded feature phones have been selling in India all the while, but now we will be scripting a new chapter.”

Nummela may be factually correct but in fact, given the upheavals Nokia underwent in the last few years, its products had practically disappeared in India. It was a sorry comedown for a company whose handsets were used to make the first-ever mobile phone call in the country on July 31, 1995, and which, as late as 2007, held 60 per cent market share. Nokia suffered as its smartphone forays, using the Symbian 3 and Meego operating system and later Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system, could not keep pace with Apple and Samsung. With market share dwindling worldwide, it sold its devices and services business to Microsoft in late 2013, but even Microsoft – which dropped the Nokia brand and rechristened the phones Microsoft Lumia – could do nothing with it.

It is rumoured that Nokia – whose telecom infrastructure business continued to thrive – never reconciled to the disappearance of its brand and from the day it was sold set about working on a new company to revive it. The terms of the sale restricted Nokia from selling smartphones for the next two years, but soon after the period expired, HMD Global – owned by former Nokia employees and nurtured by the company itself, though without any financial investment – was born. (Nummela himself spent 17 years with Nokia.) As it happened, Microsoft, disillusioned with the Lumia’s failure, was soon ready to sell off its feature phones business, and in May 2016, HMD Global – along with Taiwan’s Foxconn – snapped it up. N