Nokia sold most of its Devices and Services business to Microsoft back in 2014 for $7.2 billion., but it still profits from the Nokia brand on phones it hasn’t built, plus it gets a check from nearly every smartphone maker on Earth, Apple included, through patents that it filed pre-iPhone. For the former, HMD Global makes the phones that are branded as Nokia, while Nokia Technologies collects royalties from patent licensing.
Nokia’s exit from hardware
How the sale to Microsoft ended Nokia’s run as a phone maker
Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s Devices and Services unit broke down to about $4.4 billion, while a patent license came in at around $1.9 billion, according to reporting by NBC News at the time. The deal included the transfer of about 32,000 Nokia employees to Microsoft, as well.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s purchase didn’t really pan out for the company. It wrote off $7.6 billion related to the acquisition in 2015, according to TechCrunch, admitting defeat within a year. Nokia, though, kept its name, its patents, and its network infrastructure business (the bit that keeps making money today), while it handed off the manufacturing risk to Microsoft.
Now HMD Global builds the phones
2016 licensing deal that put the Nokia name back on shelves
In 2016, a year after Microsoft gave up on making Nokia phones, the Finnish company signed an exclusive, ten-year deal with the newly created HMD Global Oy, giving it the sole right to make Nokia-branded phones and tablets worldwide in exchange for royalty payments that covered both brand and patent licensing. HMD Global, of course, was founded by former Nokia execs who wanted to keep the brand’s phone lineage alive, just under license.
Every Nokia-branded device sold since December 2016 has generated a royalty payment for Nokia without having to deal with any manufacturing issues. Nokia supplies the name and the IP, while the licensee (HMD) supplies the factories, marketing, and risk of carrying an inventory. It’s similar to the way Motorola’s corporate split played out between the brand people know and the industrial arm that doesn’t get talked about much. Separating “the name” from the factory that makes the hardware has been good to both companies.
The real money isn’t the phones, it’s the patents
Nokia Technologies, not HMD royalties, gets the billions
Nokia Technologies, the licensing arm, posted $2.2 billion in net sales for 2024, up from $1.3 billion in 2023, a 78% jump driven by new smartphone licensing deals with Oppo and Vivo, plus catch-up payments from earlier disputes. The Finnish company also signed a new long-term patent license agreement with Apple, effective January 2024, which replaced its earlier 2017 deal. The terms are confidential, but it has been described as a multi-year agreement. It’s not just Apple, either, as Nokia renewed its agreements with Samsung in 2023, Huawei in December 2022, and Honor, Oppo, and Vivo, virtually all the major smartphone players.
Nokia runs about 26,000 patent families built on more than $162 billion of spending on research and development since 2000, which is why Nokia gets paid for devices running on 2G through 5G. Even if nothing else happens, Nokia’s annual net sales rate comes in at around $1.6 billion, with more than $930 million of that due to contracted recurring revenue every year through 2030. During all this activity, Nokia folded “Nokia Technologies” into a new Mobile Infrastructure segment and renamed the licensing unit “Technology Standards.”
The company isn’t sitting still, of course, and has started licensing patents into new areas like automotive, signing deals with multiple Chinese automakers and Mercedes, as our connectivity needs move into the car.
The Nokia phone brand’s shaky future
HMD’s exclusive deal is over
HMD’s license to build Nokia-branded smartphones was amended in August 2023, and set to expire by March 2026. HMD then tarted shifting to a more multi-brand strategy built around its own name instead. HMD started selling phones and other accessories under the HMD brand in 2024 and delisted Nokia-branded smartphones from European storefronts entirely by September of that year. You can see the Nokia-light strategy in HMD’s Mobile World Congress 2025, too.
In July 2025, a Nokia community manager posted on r/Nokia that the company is open to partnering with a large-scale mobile manufacturer to keep Nokia-branded smartphones relevant after the HMD exclusivity lapse. The post has since been deleted.
HMD itself may not be doing too well, either, as it announced a pullback from the more profit-heavy US market in 2025.
Still, the two companies continue to work together, signing an extension to the manufacturing deal, only for feature phones, which pushes the license three years past the original 2026 cutoff. HMD controls more than 22% of India’s lucrative feature phone market (with 54 million feature phones sold in 2024). It also doesn’t hurt that feature phones are having a comeback moment.
Nokia isn’t the only lapsed phone brand still getting action
BlackBerry and Windows Phone
BlackBerry stopped building its own phones, too, and licensed its name to TCL and then OnwardMobility. After that deal fell through, the company sold off $600 million of its non-core mobile patents in 2022, making a similar (if cleaner) exit from hardware into pure IP. Even Windows Phone hardware has a second life with a small, dedicated fanbase.
The Nokia name doesn’t need a Nokia factory to keep paying out
Nokia doesn’t need to make or sell a single phone to make money from phones. As long as 5G networks exist, the company will keep getting paid. Whether Nokia lands a new manufacturing partner before HMD’s 2026 deadline (even taking into account the small extension for feature phones) will help decide the future fate of this seminal phone brand.