Report: Nokia to Re-enter Smartphone Market in 2016

Written by DH Kass 1
April 21, 2015

Nokia next year will return to the smartphone market it supposedly abandoned when it sold its handset business to Microsoft in September, 2013, according to a new report.

Finnish device maker Nokia (NOK), once regarded as synonymous with the mobile phone, will return to the smartphone market it supposedly abandoned when it sold its handset business to Microsoft (MSFT) in September, 2013 for $7.1 billion, according to a new report.

Early in 2016, users can expect to see Nokia smartphones on the consumer market, two sources told Re/code. The iconic vendor’s plan to re-enter the hotly competitive handset market–dominated at the top by Apple (AAPL) and Samsung with elbowing among upstart Xiaomi, Lenovo, Huawei and LG–is part of a wider blueprint for other technology projects on Nokia’s radar such as virtual reality, the report said.

Word of Nokia’s plans comes on the heels of the vendor’s $16.6 billion purchase of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), in a move to root its makeover to a networking equipment provider, competing with the likes of Cisco (CSCO) and Ericsson (ERIC).

It’s Nokia’s Technologies unit, which licenses the vendor’s large patent portfolio, that’s said to be spearheading the move back into the smartphone market. According to Re/code, Nokia could follow a blueprint it already has in place for designing new products and licensing the technology to OEMs, as it’s done with the Android-based Zlauncher program and the N1 tablet, currently selling in China under the Nokia brand.

“They have a lot of great stuff in development,” Richard Kerris, an ex-Nokia executive, told Re/code. “It gave me complete confidence that Nokia is a company that is not going away.”

At the end of this year, Nokia will be free and clear of the Microsoft deal to sell phones under its own brand and by Q3 next year it will be able to license its brand for others to use, Re/code reported. With those markers in mind, Nokia already is hiring to design products aimed at a next year launch.

For now, Nokia didn’t tell Re/code anything about its future plans, other than to say that it’s “expanding into exciting new areas … with a focus on enabling the human possibilities of the connected world.”