Nokia smartphones will officially be back on the market in 2017, the Finnish company announced at its Capital Markets Day event last Tuesday on a slideshow it presented to investors about the future of Nokia. The revamped smartphone is anticipated to premiere at the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain.
The actual building of the smartphones, however, will not be done by Nokia as the company sold its factories to Microsoft years ago. Instead, the company will merely take on the role of supervisor and maintain ownership over the brand and patents, while a third-party company takes charge of designing and marketing. This is a similar strategy being undertaken by Apple with Foxconn and Pegatron in China, according to Tech Worm.
The third party, in this case, is HMD Global, which entered into a ten-year exclusive agreement with Nokia that will allow the brand to be used on the smartphones and tablets of HMD. The agreement also included a pledge to spend $500 million on marketing between 2017 to 2019, according to GSM Arena.
Taiwanese company Foxconn, meanwhile, will take charge of manufacturing the Nokia-branded smartphones and tablets. Both Foxconn and HMD have previous ties to Nokia: the former is behind Nokia's N1 tablet, while the latter was created by Nokia employees.
According to the Economic Times, the Nokia smartphone leading the brand's 2017 comeback will be its D1C that runs on Android 7 Nougat. It will boast a Full HD 1080p display, 13-megapixel rear and 8-megapixel front-facing cameras, 3GB of RAM and an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor.
Other plans on the roadmap Nokia presented to investors at the Capital Markets Day in Barcelona included expanded virtual reality leadership, a digital health brand transition and patent licensing expansion in 2017. The year after, the company is expecting to license VR technology, grow in remote patient care in Digital Health, continue growth and diversification in patent licensing and push incubation in new areas.
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