Maybe so. Just this weekend during the start of the Mobile World Congress in the city of Barcelona in Spain, the Finland based tech company has announced that is going ahead with its plans to start selling smartphone devices again. However, Nokia just could not provide any definite timeline, which means that it could happen this year, next year, or in five years.
In the early 1990s, Nokia achieved a significant level of success selling cellular phones, and its dominance lasted for nearly two decades. With highly popular products such as the 3210 and the 3310, the company was at the top of the world, and it looked like it was going to rule the mobile world forever.
But when Apple introduced its iPhone device in 2007, the era of the modern smartphone began, and Nokia never really recovered from the sudden shift in the industry. Soon, other mobile players such as Samsung, LG, and HTC overtook Nokia and the Finnish company was never able to really keep up.
By 2014, software giant Microsoft had acquired Nokia’s mobile business for a sum of $7.2 billion. Nokia has since regained the rights to sell smartphone devices under the Nokia branding. Back in April of last year, it was reported that Nokia was planning to go back to making and selling smartphones and other mobile devices. However, over the past twelve months, the company only managed to launch one tablet device powered by Google’s Android mobile operating system, the Nokia N1.
As explained by Rajeev Suri, the chief executive officer of Nokia, the company is not actually hurrying to enter into the smartphone market again. Instead, Suri stated that Nokia is merely waiting for the right partner before it can begin introducing smartphone products once more. Suri had indeed said earlier that Nokia will technically not manufacture its own smartphones, but will go for licensing the Nokia brand name to a designated manufacturer.
Despite what the company has gone through in the last decade or so, Nokia still thinks that it can get back in the game and compete with the Samsungs and Apples of the world. According to Suri, the Nokia brand is still a very popular name in mobile, maybe not in emerging markets such as India, but in major markets such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Also, Nokia has been busy with other projects, notably on building 5G networks and developing connected devices after acquiring Alcatel-Lucent last year.
