Short answer: Nokia controlled roughly 51 percent of the global mobile phone market in 2007, the same year the iPhone launched with about 5 percent. By 2013, Nokia’s smartphone share had collapsed to single digits. New CEO Stephen Elop, hired from Microsoft in September 2010, wrote an internal memo in February 2011 comparing Nokia’s position to a man standing on a burning oil platform, and days later announced Nokia would abandon its own Symbian operating system for Windows Phone. Microsoft bought Nokia’s phone business for approximately $7.2 billion in a deal that closed in April 2014, then wrote off roughly $7.6 billion against it in July 2015. In 2016, Microsoft sold the feature-phone assets to Foxconn’s FIH Mobile and a new company called HMD Global for a reported $350 million, and HMD has made Nokia-branded Android phones since. Nokia the phone brand still exists. Nokia the company that made it famous does not make phones anymore.
Three separate companies made phones under the Nokia name across roughly fifteen years, and untangling which one did what is most of what people actually want to know when they ask this question.
What Nokia was before any of this happened
Through the 1990s and 2000s, Nokia was the world’s largest handset maker by a wide margin, known for durable hardware, long battery life, and Symbian, an operating system it developed with other manufacturers and eventually came to control outright. Nokia phones were the default choice across huge parts of the world, and its market share peaked at roughly half of all mobile phones sold globally in 2007, the same year Apple shipped the first iPhone.
That scale is the reason Nokia’s decline reads as sharper than most stories in this genre. This was not a scrappy challenger that never broke through. It was the dominant company in its industry losing that position within about six years.
2007 to 2010: Symbian ages in place while the market changes shape
The iPhone in 2007, followed by the first Android handset in 2008, redefined what a smartphone was expected to do: a large touchscreen, an app ecosystem, and a browser built for the full web rather than a mobile-optimized one. Symbian had been designed for an earlier generation of hardware and a keypad-and-stylus interaction model, and retrofitting a touch-first interface onto it produced phones that worked but felt like they were fighting their own operating system.
Nokia kept selling in enormous volumes through this period, particularly in markets outside North America and Western Europe, so the decline was not visible in headline unit numbers right away. It showed up first in developer interest and in reviews, both of which increasingly treated Symbian as the platform you used if you could not afford or access an iPhone or an Android device, rather than a first choice.
February 2011: the burning platform
Stephen Elop, hired as Nokia’s CEO from Microsoft in September 2010, circulated an internal memo to Nokia staff in early February 2011 that was not written for public release but leaked within days. It compared Nokia’s competitive position to an oil rig worker standing on a burning platform, forced to make a survival decision under conditions nobody had chosen. The memo argued that Nokia had fallen behind on ecosystems, not individual features, and that incremental fixes would not close the gap.
Three days after the memo leaked, Elop announced that Nokia would abandon both Symbian and MeeGo, an in-development Linux-based successor, in favor of adopting Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform. Nokia’s stock dropped roughly 14 percent on the announcement. The decision effectively told the market that Nokia itself no longer believed in the platform millions of its own phones were currently running, which made those existing phones harder to sell from that day forward.
Why abandoning Symbian for Windows Phone was defensible and still failed
The logic Elop laid out was not irrational. Symbian was not competitive against iOS and Android, MeeGo was not ready to ship at scale, and building a third credible mobile ecosystem alone, from a standing start, against two companies with years of developer relationships already, was not realistic for Nokia to attempt by itself. Partnering with Microsoft brought a modern operating system and a well-funded partner in one move.
The problem was that Windows Phone had the exact same problem Nokia was trying to escape: too few users to attract developers, and too few apps to attract users. Betting the company on a partner platform that could not close its own gap tied Nokia’s fate to a second struggling ecosystem instead of one. The mechanism behind that loop, and how it eventually ended Windows Phone entirely, is covered in full in what happened to Windows Phone.
2011 to 2013: the Lumia years
Nokia’s Windows Phone-based Lumia line launched in late 2011, starting with the Lumia 800. The hardware itself was well regarded; Nokia’s camera engineering in particular, most notably on the Lumia 1020, was considered ahead of most rivals at the time. It did not reverse the platform-level app gap, and Nokia’s overall smartphone market share kept falling through this period even as individual Lumia reviews were often positive.
2014: Microsoft buys the phone business
Microsoft agreed in September 2013 to acquire Nokia’s Devices and Services business, and the deal closed in April 2014 at approximately $7.2 billion, with Elop moving to Microsoft as part of the transaction. Nokia the company continued to exist afterward, retaining its networking equipment business and its Nokia Technologies patent licensing arm, but it no longer made the phones carrying its own name.
Fifteen months later, in July 2015, Microsoft announced an impairment charge of roughly $7.6 billion against the phone business it had just bought, along with cuts of up to 7,800 jobs, a write-down larger than the original purchase price.
2016: HMD Global and the return of Nokia-branded phones
In May 2016, Microsoft sold its remaining feature-phone assets to Foxconn subsidiary FIH Mobile and to HMD Global, a newly formed company led by former Nokia executives, for a reported $350 million. HMD separately licensed the Nokia brand from Nokia Technologies, giving it the right to sell Nokia-branded phones and tablets without Nokia the company manufacturing them directly. HMD’s Nokia-branded phones since 2017 have run Android rather than Symbian or Windows Phone, made through Foxconn’s manufacturing network.
That arrangement is the version of “Nokia” most people encounter today: a licensing and design company, not the vertically integrated manufacturer that once made and sold a phone in half the world.
Nokia phones and Symbian today
Symbian itself was fully discontinued as an active platform years earlier, with Nokia’s last Symbian-based phones shipping around 2012 to 2013 and support winding down after that. HMD’s more recent business decisions have continued to shift: the company scaled back its US phone operations and moved toward selling devices under its own HMD brand rather than Nokia’s, a licensing and strategy question that sits outside the history covered here.
The full sequence, in order
| Year | What happened | Who did it |
|---|---|---|
| 2007 | Nokia holds roughly 51% global market share; iPhone launches | Nokia, Apple |
| Sept 2010 | Stephen Elop hired as CEO from Microsoft | Nokia |
| Feb 2011 | Burning platform memo leaks; Symbian and MeeGo abandoned for Windows Phone | Nokia |
| Late 2011 | Lumia line launches | Nokia |
| Sept 2013 | Microsoft agrees to buy Nokia’s phone business | Microsoft |
| April 2014 | Acquisition closes, approximately $7.2 billion | Microsoft |
| July 2015 | Microsoft writes off approximately $7.6 billion, cuts up to 7,800 jobs | Microsoft |
| May 2016 | Feature-phone assets sold to Foxconn/FIH and HMD Global for a reported $350 million | Microsoft, HMD |
| 2017 onward | HMD ships Nokia-branded Android phones under license | HMD Global |
What Nokia lost
The obvious loss was the phone business itself, sold off in pieces across two separate transactions in three years. The less obvious loss was the twelve-year run as the default phone in most of the world, a position no company has held as broadly since. That collapse also explains a pattern seen elsewhere in this era: a platform that ties its survival to a partner’s unproven ecosystem inherits that partner’s risk, which is the same trap that closed out what happened to Palm and webOS and what happened to BlackBerry phones around the same years, each for its own version of the same reason.
The full index of the era’s discontinued hardware, grouped by what actually ended each one, is at the dead gadgets of the 2000s and 2010s.
A note on the numbers
The 51 percent 2007 market-share figure, the $7.2 billion acquisition price, the $7.6 billion write-down, and the up to 7,800 job cuts are each drawn from contemporaneous company statements and SEC-reported disclosures and are consistent across independent reporting. The $350 million figure for the 2016 Foxconn/HMD sale is the widely reported deal value from coverage at the time; Microsoft did not break out a separately audited public figure for that specific transaction, so it is presented here as reported rather than as an official disclosed number.
FAQ
Is the Nokia that sells phones today the same company as the old Nokia?
No. Nokia the original company sold its phone business to Microsoft in 2014, exited phones entirely, and kept its networking and patent-licensing businesses. Nokia-branded phones since 2017 are made by HMD Global, a separate company that licenses the Nokia name.
Why did Nokia abandon Symbian?
CEO Stephen Elop concluded in early 2011 that Symbian could not compete with iOS and Android and that Nokia lacked the resources to build a competitive replacement alone, so Nokia adopted Windows Phone instead. Symbian phones continued shipping for a couple more years before being phased out.
What was the burning platform memo?
An internal memo Stephen Elop sent to Nokia staff in February 2011, comparing Nokia’s situation to a worker on an oil platform on fire, forced to jump into cold water rather than stay and be burned. It leaked publicly within days and was followed shortly after by the announcement that Nokia was abandoning Symbian.
How much did Microsoft pay for Nokia’s phone business, and what happened afterward?
Approximately $7.2 billion, in a deal that closed in April 2014. Fifteen months later, in July 2015, Microsoft wrote off roughly $7.6 billion against that same business and cut up to 7,800 jobs.
Can you still buy a Symbian phone or a Windows Phone-based Lumia new?
No. Both platforms are fully discontinued. Symbian’s last Nokia phones shipped around 2012 to 2013, and Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 Mobile, the platform’s final version, in December 2019.
