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Nokia phones find a new champion, with Android at its side - CNETNokia phones find a new champion, with Android at its side
Nokia, the Finnish company that embodied the mobile phone revolution until Silicon Valley giants pushed it aside, will live on again as phone brand.
Undoing a portion of its 2014 acquisition of Nokia's phone business, Microsoft is selling off its low-end phone unit as part of a $350 million deal announced Wednesday that will see about 4,500 employees leave the company. The buyers are FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Foxconn, and a new Finland-based company called HMD Global.
HMD will make Nokia-branded phones using Google's Android software, "uniting one of the world's iconic mobile brands with the leading mobile operating system and app development community," Finland's Nokia Technologies said in a statement.
The deal gives HMD exclusive rights for 10 years to sell Nokia-branded phones and tablets. Its CEO-to-be is Arto Nummela, a former Nokia exec who now leads Microsoft's mobile business in Asia, the Middle East and Africa and its lower-end feature phone business, which includes Asha and Nokia-branded phones. He's betting heavily on that brand.