The company that once dominated the mobile phone industry may be plotting a comeback. Less than a week after Nokia announced plans to buy Alcatel-Lucent, a Re/code report claims that Nokia Technologies hopes to launch a new phone.
Nokia sold its mobile device business to Microsoft last year, and the terms of that contract prevent Nokia from licensing its name for use on devices until the second half of this year and it cannot directly sell Nokia-branded phones until 2016. So the company is not expected to launch its own phone until next year at the earliest.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has abandoned the Nokia name in favor of the moniker it used when it was Nokia’s partner in the smartphone business. Lumia is now the brand name for all new smartphones sold by Nokia’s former handset unit.
That doesn’t mean that there are not still millions of Nokia phones out there. The company continued to dominate the global feature-phone market even as the smartphone market took off without it. Smartphones did not outsell feature phones until 2013, and as recently as last year the company was still selling more mobile phones than Apple.
Nokia’s decision to merge with Alcatel-Lucent could complicate or enhance any plans it has to get back into the smartphone business. The French company develops and markets a line of budget Android smartphones under the Alcatel One Touch brand.
Nokia Technologies, the unit that is reportedly working on a new phone, is the patent licensing part of Nokia. After selling the device business to Microsoft, Nokia was left with its network equipment and software business (by far its largest unit), its patent licensing arm, and its Here maps unit. Now the company is said to be looking at a sale of Here as it prepares to merge with Alcatel-Lucent.
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