What remains of Nokia after the Microsoft Devices & Services acquisition?

Martin Brinkmann
Sep 3, 2013
Updated • Feb 15, 2014
Microsoft
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Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia came as a surprise to many who stayed up late yesterday or woke up this morning to read the news on their favorite tech blogs or news sites. It is hard to ignore, with nearly every website under the sun posting the exact same information about the deal.

In short: Microsoft pays 3.79 billion Euro to purchase Nokia's Devices & Services businesses, and another 1.65 billion Euro to license Nokia patents.  This includes the Lumia and Asha brands, and the right to use the Nokia brand on feature phones.

The total of 5.44 billion Euro will be paid in cash by Microsoft, with the acquisition expected to close in the first quarter of 2014.

The deal makes sense for Microsoft as it can now compete on an eye-to-eye level with Google - which acquired Motorola some time ago - and Apple, who is producing it own line of phones. Microsoft released a "strategic rationale" pdf document in which company executives explain the rationalities behind the acquisition.

Benefits include a gross margin increase from less than $10 per unit in royalty to a smart device gross margin of over $40 per unit and the integration of hardware research & development and design. Because of the gross margin increase, Microsoft estimates that it has to sell more than 50 million phones for operating income breakeven.

microsoft nokia acquisition

Microsoft plans to capture 15% of the worldwide smartphone shipments market share in 2018 expecting to generate an annual revenue of 45 billion US Dollars from that.

What about Nokia?

What remains of Nokia after the acquisition? We have already established that Microsoft will take over the company's Devices & Services division. The two divisions that remain Nokia are HERE (formerly Location & Commerce) and Nokia Siemens Networks.

HERE develops location-based products and services for a broad range of devices and operating systems, including our Lumia smartphones. As of January 1, 2013, HERE is the new name of our former Location & Commerce business and reportable segment.

Nokia Siemens Networks, jointly owned by Nokia and Siemens and consolidated by Nokia, is a leading global provider of telecommunications infrastructure, with a focus on the mobile broadband market.

HERE is best known for its HERE maps platform, the mapping service that is an integral part of Nokia smartphones. The company plans to continue development of the platform to become the "leading independent location cloud platform company" that is offering "mapping and location services across different screens and operating systems".

Especially the operating systems bit is interesting, as it can very well mean that Nokia will make available HERE for other mobile operating systems.

NSN will continue operations in the telecommunications infrastructure world.

Commenting on the announcement, NSN CEO Rajeev Suri said that "Today marks an important step for our parent company Nokia, and they have our full support.  For NSN, it is business as usual.  We remain focused on executing our strategy, completing our restructuring and delivering industry-leading innovation to our customers every day."

It is likely that Microsoft will use the Nokia brand name for Windows Phone feature phones for some time to come as the deal includes the rights to do so. Eventually though, the company will likely drop the Nokia brand name completely.

Closing Words

You will be able to buy Nokia phones in the foreseeable future, maybe the next two or three years. Eventually though, those phones will become Microsoft Lumia and Microsoft Asha phones. Nokia's sole contribution after that period will be its HERE service in the consumer world, and NSN providing telecommunications infrastructure.

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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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