Nokia is disappearing from the phone circle? A few days ago, it was reported that HMD Global, which has been holding the Nokia mobile phone brand for the past few years, is preparing for the previously announced "private label transformation plan", the company is gradually promoting the "de-Nokia", and it is expected that the Nokia brand mobile phone will no longer be launched this year. In addition, Nokia's official website has also removed the "mobile phone" column, and users cannot enter this category from the homepage of the official website.
At present, HMD Global has changed the official account name of Platform X from @nokiamobile to @hmdglobal. In the summer of 2022, HMD Global's official WeChat account was also renamed from "Nokia Mobile" to "HMD Technologies Limited".
In fact, HMD's "breakup" with Nokia has long been symptomatic. Last spring, Nokia announced that it had abandoned the 60-year-old blue and white logo, and the new logo chose a more vibrant color background combined with white lettering. Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark said in an interview that Nokia is now a business technology company, and the application of the new logo also represents a farewell to the past.
After Nokia changed to a new logo, HMD also ushered in its seventh anniversary last fall, when Ean-Francois Baril, co-founder and CEO of HMD Global, revealed that it would launch a series of private label mobile phones this year, and officially announced HMD's full name "Human Mobile Devices". At the same time, HMD has migrated the Nokia community to Discord in general over the past two years, but this time, the trendy operation is somewhat self-defeating.
HMD not only did not carry out product classification operation and management according to the previous community**, but even the Nokia brand was lost, and only HMD-related information versions are left on HMD's Discord server, which directly led to the loss of Nokia fans who use a large number of HMD's products. In this way, HMD and Nokia have not escaped the "seven-year itch" after all.
So the question is, why didn't Nokia, which was once in the mobile phone circle flourish and full of feelings, failed to return as the king?
In fact, Nokia's mobile phones under the leadership of HMD have had a dream start when they returned to the mobile phone circle. Previously, on January 11, 2017, HMD held a press conference in Beijing, officially announcing the return of Nokia mobile phones to the Chinese market and launching the first model after the brand's restart, Nokia 6. Different from the domestic market at that time, which focused on cost-effective products, Nokia 6 did not choose the road of cost performance, but tried to impress consumers with balanced configuration, excellent design, pure system, and Nokia brand feelings.
At that time, under the leadership of HMD, Nokia's mobile phones not only had emotional bonuses, but also had a smoother, more power-efficient, and advertising-free system that is rare in the industry, and even had the blessing of Zeiss. So in just one year, HMD delivered an astonishing answer of 10 million smartphones sold worldwide.
By the time of the Nokia 6 unveiled in the spring of 20181. Nokia 7 and other models still continue the characteristics of Nokia 6, which is enough to prove that the market recognizes HMD's design, exquisite workmanship, and the premium brought by the Nokia brand. It seems that HMD has also accurately found a "small but beautiful" market positioning.
However, after gaining a foothold in the market, HMD began to try to innovate and change. In the summer of 2018, HMD launched the X series model, and its selling point is "leapfrog experience". For example, the Nokia X6 released at the end of May 2018 is a collection of full screen, glass body, Snapdragon GB memory, dual camera, pure Android system, **but only 1299 yuan from a cost-effective product. Although the Nokia X series that has taken the cost-effective route has indeed achieved good results for a while, this decision is a thirst-quenching decision for Nokia mobile phones.
The cost-effective route will indeed quickly win the favor of most consumers, but at the cost of breaking through the best system built by HMD in the past two years with excellent design, pure system, and not only brand premium. And the cost-effective route also means that HMD has entered a battlefield that it is not familiar with, and is forced to fight hand-to-hand with a number of domestic mobile phone manufacturers. The results of HMD's big leap can actually be seen from the financial report of the company's major shareholder FIH (Foxconn).
According to the 2018 annual report released by FIH, although the sales of Nokia's X series are gratifying, the sales volume is not enough to dilute the R&D costs, and even causes HMD to lose one X series mobile phone when it sells it. HMD's aggressive approach has also led to problems in its relationship with FIH, with almost all Nokia smartphones not being made by FIH in the second half of 2019 and since. HMD can quickly launch high-end flagships such as Nokia 8 and mid-range models such as Nokia 6 after its official operation, which is actually due to FIH's strong ODM capabilities and financial support.
The reason why the relationship between HMD and FIH tends to be negative is also due to a report from FIH revealed by Nokiamob last year. It shows that FIH is dissatisfied with HMD's revenue performance, and has put pressure on it, and even voluntarily rejected the latter's product orders. According to Nokiamob's interpretation, the relationship between HMD and FIH in recent years is not like that between the investor and the investee, but HMD's attempt to "repay the money" to FIH to redeem himself.
In recent years, HMD has lost the full support of FIH, and in recent years it has not been able to recreate a flagship product with an exploratory nature like the Nokia 9 Pureview, as well as a high-end machine in the conventional sense such as the Nokia 8. So much so that Adam Ferguson, head of product marketing at HMD, admitted in an interview in 2022 that HMD has withdrawn from the competition in the flagship market, saying that "it doesn't make sense for us to make an $800 phone at the moment." ”
Since the epidemic, HMD has changed its market strategy and actively withdrawn from the competition of mid-to-high-end products, but has worked hard in the feature phone and semi-intelligent phone market, especially the 4G feature phones launched aiming at the 2G network withdrawal tide are more popular, such as Nokia 2660 Flip, Nokia 5710 XpressAudio, and Nokia 8210 4G and other products have also swept this market. As recently as November 2023, HMD announced that it had won the top spot in the feature phone market, with a revenue share of 30 percent in the global feature phone market7%, and the proportion of sales was 224%。
Withdrawing from the competition of mid-to-high-end smartphones, while focusing on feature phones and low-end smartphones, HMD's "war avoidance" strategy does have some different paths, and it has also made it survive in the increasingly competitive mobile phone market. However, in the market of feature phones and entry-level smartphones, it is often difficult for brand power to play a role, after all, the target audience of this market segment will hardly pay for Nokia's feelings, and Nokia's logo will not be able to support the premium at this time.
In other words, for today's HMD, the Nokia brand is already a "chicken rib", and it has become meaningless to continue to launch products with the Nokia logo, so "breaking up" has become a natural thing.