Nokia stated in 2022 that the mobile phone would disappear by 2030. But 14 months later, the situation for Nokia does not look particularly good.
At the end of 2022, Nishat Batra (Chief Strategy and Technology Officer of Nokia) made a very ambitious prediction: The mobile phone will disappear. This was reported by our colleagues from 3Djuegos.
In an interview, Nishant Batra said that mobile phones will disappear in less than a decade. And surprisingly, he pointed out which technology he believes will replace cell phones: By 2030, the mobile phone should be replaced by the Metaverse and virtual reality glasses. However, the first images from Zuckerberg’s Metaverse failed to convince anyone.
As reasons, he mainly cited the multimillion-dollar investments by Mark Zuckerberg or the recent launch of the Vision Pro from Apple.
About a year after the interview, the situation looks anything but rosy: Nokia is doing worse than it has in years and the mobile phone market continues to thrive.
Layoffs and Patent Disputes
What is the situation at Nokia? At the end of 2023, the Finnish company announced it would lay off around 14,000 employees in order to save 1.2 billion euros (Via tagesschau.de).
Particularly, the business in North America performed significantly worse than expected and therefore they wanted to cut costs by 15 – 30%. Already in the first half of 2023, Nokia had lowered its annual targets. Instead of the targeted 5.67 billion euros, they had achieved “only” 4.98 billion euros. The previous year (2022), they were at 6.24 billion euros. The missing billions are what they now aim to save.
At the beginning of 2024, HMD, the company behind today’s Nokia phones, announced that it wanted to produce its own devices. However, in a statement, HMD Global emphasized that it would continue to sell and support devices under the Nokia license (via pcwelt.de). It did not reveal whether Nokia products would remain in its portfolio long term.
How is the mobile phone market doing? The smartphone market has stagnated for several years and is no longer growing as strongly as it used to. According to data from Canalys, around 500 million devices are still sold quarterly. At the top are still Samsung, Apple, and as the third manufacturer Xiaomi. So one cannot yet speak of a “disappearance” that Nishant Batra referred to 14 months ago.
More on the topic of smartphones: A person bought an old iPhone for more than 160,000 euros. But why spend so much money on an old device? The seller refers to the device as the “Holy Grail” among mobile phone collectors:
Someone bought a 16-year-old mobile phone for more than 160,000 euros
