Finland’s Nokia might be the largest handset maker on the planet, accounting for about 40 percent of all mobile phones on the planet—including vast numbers of entry level phones all around the world— but the company has been struggling in the lucrative United States market, where it has fallen to about a 10 percent market share. But Nokia is not giving up: according to Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Nokia will be rolling a number f new handsets in conjunction with U.S. mobile operators in the coming months, including CDMA handsets for use on Sprint’s and Verizon’s mobile networks.
“In the next few months operators will carry a lot of new products from us,” Nokia chief designer Alastair Curtis told the paper.
However, there’s an interesting twist: some of these phones might actually be designed and built by companies other than Nokia, and merely be sold under the Nokia brand, with Nokia software on board. The Finnish company has signed agreements with smaller handset manufacturers to product phones under the Nokia brand.
Nokia has been engaged in a long-term patent dispute with rival mobile technology company Qualcomm over licensing CDMA technology; some industry watchers have speculated that the legal wrangling has made Nokia reluctant to commit to the still CDMA-heavy U.S. market. However, the result is that the world’s largest handset maker can look to one of the world’s most lucrative mobile marketplaces as a primary location to expand its business.
