Finally confirmed that Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri has announced the Finnish company's intention to return to the smartphone market in 2016, after they denied its plan to make a comeback in the mobile phone industry last April 2015.
Instead, Nokia CEO plans to find partners capable of working on the manufacturing and distribution parts, while it designs and licenses its brand name. Microsoft also licensed the Nokia name to be used on smartphones and feature phones with a period of exclusivity and usage on both. Nokia smartphones would be exclusively under the Microsoft banner for 18 months while Microsoft feature phone could be named Nokia up to 10 years after the purchase.
It's best interest of Microsoft to switch to a brand new name that it has full control over as fast as possible. This process has already started with the latest Windows Phones switching to the "Lumia 830".
Nokia has already shown this model works with the launch of the N1 Tablet in China. It is manufactured and distributed by Foxconn and a Taiwanese company. Despite the Nokia Brand might hold a little appeal to the customers in the West, in South-East Asia it still manages a good amount of feature phone sales. Nokia still is one of the largest feature phone brands and there are some that say Android adoption in 2010 would have kept Nokia above water.
The Nokia smartphones that does arrive in 2016 will most likely not be manufactured by a Western company, unless one of the less well known mobile companies in Spain, Italy or Brazil plan on picking up the brand license and design. Maybe Nokia itself will once again rise in that space even without any production capacity of its own.
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