Nokia to sell handset business to Microsoft for $7.2 bn

Two years after hitching its fate to Microsoft's燱indows Phone
software, Nokia燾ollapsed into the arms of the U.S. software giant,
agreeing to sell its main handset business for 5.44 billion euros
($7.2 billion).
Nokia, which will continue as a maker of networking equipment and
holder of patents, was once the world's dominant handset manufacturer,
but was long since overtaken by Apple燼nd Samsung .
Nokia's Canadian boss Stephen Elop, who ran Microsoft's business
software division before jumping to Nokia in 2010, will now return to
the U.S. firm as head of its mobile devices business.
He is being discussed as a possible replacement for Microsoft's
retiring CEO Steve Ballmer, who is tryingto remake the U.S. firm into
a gadget and services company like Apple before he departs.
In three years under Elop, Nokia saw its market sharecollapse and its
share price shrivel as investors bet heavily that his strategy would
fail.
In 2011, after writing a memo that said Nokia was falling behind and
lacked the in-house technology to catch up, Elop made the
controversial decision to use his former firm Microsoft's Windows
Phone for smartphones, rather than Nokia's own software or Google's
ubiquitous Android operating system.
Nokia, which had a 40 per cent share of the handset market in 2007,
now has a mere 15 per cent marketshare, with an even smaller three per
cent share in smartphones.
The sale of the handset business is not the first dramatic turn in the
148-year history of a company which has sold everything from
television sets to rubber boots