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Microsoft Sells Nokia Feature Phone Division To Foxconn

Microsoft Sells Nokia Feature Phone Division To Finnish Company Foxconn

Shilpa Chakravorty

Microsoft has recently announced that it will be selling its feature phone division to Foxconn for a price of $350 million. Additionally, the tech giant also mentioned that they will continue to work on Lumia Smartphone and Windows 10 mobile.

Assets related to the featured Nokia phones, which include brands, care network, software & services and other assets like customer contracts and critical supply agreement will be handed over to Foxconn.

FIH Mobile Limited, a subsidiary of Foxconn, will take over the business with 45,000 employees, presently working in manufacturing, distribution and sales. Finalization of the deal is expected to be happening in later part of this year.

As part of the deal, Foxconn will also acquire Microsoft Mobile Vietnam, Microsoft's Vietnam manufacturing unit, reported Gizmodo.

Notably, Microsoft purchased Nokia's phone division in 2013 for $7.1 billion, which caused transfer of 32,000 Nokia employees to Microsoft. However, considering Microsoft's latest decision to sell the phone section once again, the deal did not work out as anticipated.

Although Microsoft has hoped that the acquisition of Nokia could led to an increased sell in the Smartphones, yet due to major competitors like Apple and Google stepping in the Smartphone market, the move was not effective, reported Apple Insider.

With the increase in sales of Windows based phone, Microsoft has focused solely on improving user experience and providing applications native to the Windows Smartphone.

As a result, Microsoft swiftly lost interest in the low margin and shrinking feature phone market and wanted to focus better on the Smartphones for the emerging market.

On Wednesday, HMD mentioned that the new agreement between Microsoft and Foxconn would include the right to use the Nokia brand on feature phones, in addition to certain design rights.

HMD reportedly plans to invest more than $500 million over the next three years to support the Nokia branded feature phones and tablets.

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