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Nokia shakes up structure, creating separate smartphone and feature phone units

Symbian becomes a cash cow 'franchise platform'

Nokia shakes up structure, creating separate smartphone and feature phone units
Nokia's strategic partnership with Microsoft to adopt Windows Phone as its smartphone standard is gaining all the headlines, of course, but there are plenty of other changes happening at the Finnish company.

"Nokia is at a critical juncture, where significant change is necessary and inevitable in our journey forward," said Stephen Elop, president and CEO.

"Today, we are accelerating that change through a new path, aimed at regaining our smartphone leadership, reinforcing our mobile device platform and realising our investments in the future."

MeeGone

With MeeGo, its joint OS with Intel, now effectively shuttered - becoming an open source project - Nokia will focus most of its attention on Windows Phone.

After shipping what's labelled 'a MeeGo-related device' at some point in 2011, the MeeGo team will switch to investigating what Nokia calls, "longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences".

Work on Symbian, its feature phone OS, will also be scaled back, becoming what Nokia calls "a franchise platform".

Nokia still expects to sell plenty of Symbian devices, predicting it will add 150 million devices to the current 200 million install base. However, it will be 'leveraging previous investments to harvest additional value' - effectively using it as a profitable cash cow - and trying to transition existing users to Nokia's Windows-based smartphones.

Divide and conquer

Change is also coming within Nokia, with the expectation of more job losses throughout its global workforce, and especially in Finland. The company has put into place a new management team too.

As part of this, from April 1, its handset business will be split into two units: Smart Devices and Mobile Phones.

Each will be run separately in terms of profit and loss, and have responsibility for its own product development, management and marketing.

There will also be units labelled Markets (effectively sales), Services and Developer Experience (developer relations), Design, The CTO Office and Corporate Development, amongst others. Nokia's NAVTEQ mapping unit and Nokia Siemens Networks will continue as separate operations.

[source: Nokia]
Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.