Remember when Snake was the most poppin game on a cell phone? Nokia was once the largest phone maker in the world but they have been able to keep up with the smartphone war between Android and Apple. Check out the recent huge pink slip Nokia handed out after the jump.
Two tech giants fail to keep up as cell phones and personal computers converge. The giants join forces. On Thursday, one of them became much less giant.
Nokia, formerly known as the world’s largest mobile phone maker, announced during a news conference that up to 10,000 workers would lose their jobs. The company also said a factory in its native Finland and research operations in Germany and Canada would close.
The cutbacks aimed at “sharpening its strategy†come as Nokia lobs a Hail Mary toward smartphone relevance by partnering with Microsoft, whose own Windows Phone mobile operating system has yet to capture imaginations in a world dominated by iPhone and Android.
In a conference call to discuss Thursday’s grim news, Nokia president and CEO Stephen Elop focused not on the high-end but said the company was working with Microsoft to go even cheaper than its entry-level Lumia 610 with a specific aim of undercutting low-priced Android handsets.
“We need to compete with Android aggressively,†said Elop, as reported by The Verge. “The low-end price point war is an important part of that.â€
Very important, mostly because Nokia hasn’t been able to compete at the high end with phones from Apple, Samsung, LG, HTC, and Motorola.
Nokia made a big marketing push in the U.S. with the April launch of its flagship Lumia 900, complete with cheeky spots starring Saturday Night Live’s Chris Parnell that portrayed the proliferation of non-Nokia smartphones as a vast covert beta-testing conspiracy.
The phone got decent reviews and some free publicity when the iPhone’s Siri told one questioner that the Lumia 900 (in cyan) was “the best cell phone ever.â€
Based on the company’s second-quarter expectations, even Siri’s endorsement hasn’t sent enough people Nokia’s way to worry Apple, which sold more than 35 million iPhones last quarter. During that same period, Nokia sold upwards of 2 million phones in its Lumia line.
Whether lower prices can finally stanch Nokia’s spiraling losses and return the company to the salad days of the turn-of-the-century won’t be clear for a while, though it’s not through price that Apple and Google have kept their grip on the world’s mobile mindshare. In just the past year, Nokia has seen its smartphone sales fall by half, its phone profits disappear, and its market cap on the NYSE fall from about $24 billion to under $9 billion. On Thursday alone, its stock fell nearly 16 percent to close just above its 52-year low of $2.30.
Microsoft hasn’t suffered the same gruesome decline, though it’s obviously struggled to create anything handheld that consumers care about. With Windows Phone capturing just 2.2 percent of the worldwide smartphone market in the last quarter (a tenth of a percentage point less than Linux), hitching its mobile hopes to another company desperately trying to create a product that people want feels increasingly desperate.
