Nokia Return: Will The Finnish Firm's Revival Efforts Become Its Swan Song? [VIDEO]
When news that Nokia would be entering the phone making business once more, many tech aficionados greeted the news with much nostalgia. After all, behind the dominant smartphone brands of today such Apple and Samsung, there will always be the once-dominant Finnish giant called Nokia. However, as much as the firm's return is indeed highly supported by many consumers, Nokia's return might be a lot easier said than done.
Nokia dominated the world's cellular phone market for more than a decade, from 1998 up to 2007, the year when Steve Jobs unveiled the very first iPhone to the world. During the height of the firm's power, Nokia had a market cap of $300 billion, about 20 percent of Finland's overall GDP.
However, a series of bad decisions on the company's part, heralded by an overlying hubris surrounding its homegrown Symbian OS as a competitor to Apple's iOS and Google's open-source Android, ultimately led to Nokia's eventual decline. Though Nokia was eventually acquired by Microsoft in 2013, even those efforts proved ultimately futile, with Windows Phone being almost as unsuccessful as Nokia's own Symbian.
With Nokia's re-entry to the smartphone market, however, the Finnish giant has confirmed that it would begin embracing Android as its smartphones' operating system of choice. Of course, the fact that it would be HMD, a Finnish firm headed by a former Nokia executive, which would be manufacturing the device, would also help Nokia saturate the market with its devices once more.
One thing that Nokia could actually count on would be its feature phone business, which has actually remained pretty resilient over the years. Indeed, even as the world continued to move towards a smartphone-centric future, Nokia's feature phones still managed to make themselves into a niche product for those which require a simple, basic device.
However, even with Android and its feature phone business in tow, Nokia's efforts towards reclaiming one of the top spots in the world of mobile devices is a very steep one. Despite the fact that the firm is a brand that most smartphone users today know by heart, it is undeniable that Nokia lost a lot of years in terms of innovation.
Plus, even the low-end, feature phone business has begun to be taken over by aggressive firms with low-cost devices such as Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi. Thus, Nokia might very well end up re-entering the market on the defensive side. With Apple and Samsung claiming the top spots in the smartphone world, Nokia would need to do something very unique in order to make its presence known once more.
If any, Nokia must avoid falling into the same trap as its old powerhouse peers, Blackberry and Motorola, two other once-dominant firms which have seen their prominence decline over the past years.
Then again, if there's anything about Nokia that everyone knows, it is that the company is, just like its phones, very, very resilient. With this said, maybe it's not too late for Nokia after all.
