As you may be aware by now, Microsoft Corporation and Nokia Corporation have announced that the Boards of Directors for both companies have decided to enter into a transaction whereby Microsoft will purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, license Nokia’s patents and mapping services.
We at the unbiased blog have compiled a FIY list of the MSFT-NOK deal for all our readers. Let’s take a ride down the memory lane of a brand that connected us all – Nokia ‘Connecting People’. With a heavy heart we type this.
- Microsoft buys Nokia’s mobile phone business for 5.4bn euros ($7.2bn; £4.6bn)
- In the second quarter of 2013, Nokia shipped just 7.4 million Windows Phones compared with 31.2 million iPhones and 185 million Android smartphones
- According to forecasts unless Microsoft speeds Windows Phone innovation, in 2017 Windows Phone will comprise just 5% of overall smartphone shipments
- One big question for Nokia is what will happen to its dominant position in the cut-price “feature phone” market
- Nokia 1100 model, launched in 2003, went on to sell 250 million units and became the world’s most popular consumer electronic device
- Nokia still has a 50% share of the feature phone market in the Middle East and Africa. But if Microsoft wants to promote its software on smartphones only, it may withdraw from this end of the market altogether
- Nokia shares have fallen 93% since their 2000 high of 65 euros
- It is hard to remember just how recently Nokia was Europe’s technology superstar, with a 40% share of one of the world’s fastest growing industries and a proud record of innovation
- Nokia was a market leader for 14 years till Samsung took the crown away last year
- Nokia were so dominant. People didn’t talk about what brand, it was just about the number, 3210, 8310 or whatever you had. They took users on a journey
- Nokia was not only dominant but also thought they could not do nothing wrong and then all of a sudden, in January 2007, Steve Jobs walked on to a stage and pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and changed the world forever
- Analysts and users feel it was the ageing Symbian OS that killed Nokia
- We agree to it, as Nokia made great phones and they still do. They went through this incredible decade of innovation in hardware, but what Apple saw was that all you needed was a rectangle with a screen, and the rest was all about the software
- Nokia’s Canadian boss Stephen Elop, who ran Microsoft’s business software division before jumping to Nokia in 2010, will return to the U.S. firm as head of its mobile devices business – a Trojan horse, according to disgruntled Finnish media
- 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
- Nokia, which had 40 percent of the handset market in 2007, now has just 15 percent, and only 3 percent in smartphones
- Hired by former chairman Jorma Ollila, Elop was the first foreigner to lead it
- Nokia said it expected around 32,000 people of its roughly 90,000 worldwide staff would transfer to Microsoft, including about 4,700 who will transfer in Finland
Before we end this let’s visit the Nokia Life History 🙁
- Named in 1871 after the Nokianvirta river where mining engineer Fredrik Idestam set up his second paper mill, Nokia spent more than a century making tires, boots or cables before producing the first handheld mobile phone, the Mobira Cityman, in 1987
- Nicknamed the “Gorba” after former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was pictured using one, it weighed a thumping 800 grams and carried an even more daunting price tag – 24,000 Finnish marks (4,650 euros)
- In 1992, Nokia sold off its non-mobile divisions and launched its first digital handheld GSM phone, the Nokia 1011
- The basic Nokia 1100, launched in 2003, was a runaway hit, shifting 250 million units, making it not just the world’s best-selling mobile, but the most popular consumer electronics device of any kind.
- Nokia remained the world’s largest vendor of mobile phones until knocked off the top spot by Samsung in 2012, but it lost its lead in the lucrative smartphone market a year earlier, having been on the back foot since the launch of Apple’s iPhone in 2007
- Nokia unveiled its first Windows Phone handsets, the Lumia 710 and 800, in October 2011 after a strategic decision by new Chief executive Stephen Elop to ditch its own ailing Symbian operating system in favor of the Microsoft equivalent
- Nokia picked up the pace of product launches in 2013, including the unveiling of its Lumia 1020 with a 41-megapixel camera. Also this year, it announced a 15-euro phone, its cheapest phone ever
- Although Nokia also said in July it had shipped 7.4 million Lumia smartphones in the quarter, up 32 percent from Q1, it was fewer than the 8.1 million units analysts had anticipated. Nokia now boasts only around 15 percent of the handset market share, with an even smaller 3 percent share in smartphones
For more info:
News release: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/Sep13/09-02AnnouncementPR.aspx
Strategy deck: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Sep13/StrategicRationale.aspx
Steve B all-employee email: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Press/2013/Sep13/09-02email.aspx
Open letter to customers: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/09/02/the-next-chapter-an-open-letter-from-steve-ballmer-and-stephen-elop.aspx
Terry Myerson blog: http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/bloggingwindows/archive/2013/09/02/thoughts-on-today-s-nokia-announcement.aspx
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