During its earning call, post the strong Q3 earnings release, Nokia’s top management team talked a bit about Nokia Brand and plans to maximize its value in future. Here are some tidbits from the earnings call,
Nokia is really happy to negotiate with Microsoft in such a way that Nokia is in full ownership of the “Nokia” brand, post the Nokia-Microsoft deal.
And Nokia brand, we of course continue to view that as a very important asset. We’re actually quite pleased that we were able to negotiate the contracted margin in a way that we were able to fully keep Nokia brand in Nokia ownerships. We have still some limitations on use of the brand but we feel that that’s an important asset for Nokia and yes we have spent a little bit of additional OpEx in Networks on the rebranding from NSN to Nokia Networks, but we are not having any — call it a previous drag in our numbers from earlier brand investment if that was the question.
Nokia has recognized that Nokia brand is most valuable in area of “Mobile Phones and devices”, but due to agreement with Microsoft can’t go their yet, at the moment.
And finally on brand, we have not really spoken about anything else that we have looked at different business models, what other people have been using on brand and we will of course carefully assess what would be the best way for us to maximize the value of the Nokia brand, also taking into account that we’re in the lock-up period still in the Microsoft transaction regarding our possibility to use the brand and we have recognized that Nokia brand is the most valuable from recognition perspective in the area of mobile phones and mobile devices. And there we cannot go yet at the moment.
This is very interesting as till now, there was no hint whatsoever that Nokia may really consider “Mobile Phones” as the area of interest to en-cash Nokia brand value in future. Given its latest focus on Android with Z Launcher and HERE Beta for Android, it isn’t that hard to guess, what direction this interest may ultimately take.
