Originally announced in September last year, Microsoft has today, acquired Nokia. The deal has reached its completion, and Nokia’s Devices and Services business now belongs to Microsoft.
Nokia and Microsoft share a long history, where the former is the leading partner of the latter’s mobile operating system, Windows Phone. “The opportunity for Microsoft to be both a devices and services company, so that it can deliver the complete proposition to its consumers, is at the heart of this,” Stephen Elop, former Nokia CEO and now executive vice president of the Devices Group at Microsoft, said recently.
“We have been going through and assessing who has the best tools…so we take the best of both worlds.”, said Tom Gibbons, who has spearheaded hardware for Microsoft, and now leads the integration work for Microsoft. “The real value from this integration is bringing two globally sized capabilities in organizations together under one roof, really intimately and much more efficiently.”
The completion of the deal also makes Microsoft a hardware technology giant. The companies believe that this convergence of two tech titans will help to speed up the execution work. “Nokia certainly has a tremendous depth of experience in the design, the manufacturing and delivery of devices,” Elop said. “Nokia over the years has literally delivered billions of devices. Just in the last year alone, some hundreds of millions.”
“Customers should see a bunch of great end-to-end experiences that really empower them to have very enjoyable, very comprehensive solutions to things that they want to get done, whether you’re talking about smartphones or feature phones. The feature phone product family coming to Microsoft will start to have more of the Microsoft services shipped on those phones right out of the gate.”
As we heard yesterday, Nokia’s Chennai-based factory hasn’t been a part of the acquisition deal. However, exclusion of one of Nokia’s biggest plants hasn’t revised the original terms of the deal. Nokia will be operating the plant on a contract to Microsoft.
As Nokia becomes part of Microsoft, “We have to not only evolve to fit into Microsoft in general, but into an evolving Microsoft,” he said. Employees of Nokia’s Devices and Services business are “very excited to be joining Microsoft,” Elop said. “And we look forward to bringing our skills and experiences to Microsoft to do our very best to light up the Microsoft experiences for people all over the world.”
As part of the deal, Stephen Elop, Jo Harlow, Juha Putkiranta, Timo Toikkanen, and Chris Weber will be joining Microsoft. Whereas, the company is expected to announce Rajeev Suri as its next CEO on Tuesday.
