Nokia sells their New York office for $12 million

Nokia has had an office in White Plains, New York since 2005. Roughly 300 people worked there, and their job was to make the Finnish handset vendor relevant in the United States. They obviously failed to do that, so now the office is being sold to the tune of $12 million. That sounds like a lot, but Nokia invested $30 million into that building to make it look very … Scandinavian. Michael Rao, the guy who helped, Histogenetics, a biotechnology company, buy Nokia’s former offices says: “It’s a great deal for 12 million bucks. The building is gorgeous. It’s so spectacular.”

So is Nokia now out of America? Not even close. Back in February 2011 the phone giant moved to Sunnyvale, California to be closer to the internet companies that make the world go round. Moving to California also allowed them to hire some of the local talent, though why would someone want to work for Nokia instead of Google or Facebook is something I’ll never understand.

Back to the office in New York, I’ve never been there, but I used to have colleagues who worked there. They said it was a ghost town, that it was in the middle of nowhere, and that most everyone who worked there just ended up working from home. Employees would commute to the office once or twice a month, but that’s it. If you worked in Nokia’s New York office and know otherwise, please do sound off in the comments section below.

The more important question is when will Nokia open up an office in Washington state so they can be close to Microsoft? Nokia HQ in Espoo, Finland is 10 hours ahead compared to Redmond, aka Microsoft HQ, so I can’t imagine the two companies are having very productive meetings when one party has to work late and the other has to wake up at the crack of dawn.

[Via: The Nokia Blog]

[Image Credit: Flickr user "damato"]