7/27/2019 Microsoft Nokia Buyout- Executive Summary

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The given case talks about the buyout of once-an-industry-leader Nokia by Microsoft, once a

strategic partner of the finnish firm, and asks the reader if Microsoft had better options than

Nokia, in form of HTC, BlackBerry, Motorola or someone else who werent faring well in

the market, if it wanted to venture into the mobile handset division.

The case study draws the attention to the fact that Blackberry had a market share of 9.53%,according to IDC, whereas in view of comScore, it had a share of 12.3%. Both the surveys

showed that there was a decline in the market share of Blackberry in the 1 st quarter of 2012.

Nokia, on the other hand, had an 8.2% sales share of the smartphone for the first-quarter of

2012 according to IDC, which was down by more than 50% YoY. Nokia, which was at the

2nd spot for feature phone had its market share dwindling by 23% year over year. After some

time, both BlackBerry and Nokia were classified into others section, with a market share of

less than 4.3%, against the giants such as Samsung & Apple. Despite the aggressive

marketing, both lost significant market and platform share, but Nokia still held on desperately

to its feature phone foot-hold.

In the operating system market, Android hads a 79 percent market share, making a large jumpfrom 64.2% during the 2nd quarter of 2012, at the cost of Blackberry, Bada & Symbian OS,

which collectively had a market share of 3.4%, biggest downfall being observed in the

Symbian OS share, from 5.9% to 0.3%. Apples iOS market share dipped from 18.8 percent

to 14.2 percent, while that of Windows Phone jumped from 2.6 percent to 3.3 percent. With

an increase of meagre 0.7 percentage points, Microsoft aims at a market share of 15% in

2018.