Nokia’s smartphone unit doesn’t make any money. In fact, if it wasn’t for the feature phone division, there wouldn’t be a Nokia. Now during the past year or two we’ve heard about the Finnish handset maker closing their factories in Germany, Finland, Romania, and several other countries. Why? Because at the end of the day you simply can’t escape the attractiveness of cheap Asian labor. According to The Inquisitr, Nokia will hold a press conference on April 23rd, next Monday, to announce that they’re going to open a new factory in Vietnam. Said factory will cost roughly $300 million to build, it’ll be staffed by 10,000 people, and it’s expected that it’ll pump out 45 million phones per year by the year 2014. No word as to which kind of handsets this factory will produce, but we wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they’ll start with cheap and easy to make devices, and then progressively build up to higher end phones.
The bigger question here is what’s Nokia going to do if they can’t get Windows Phone off the ground? Are they going to sell the feature phone division to someone else so that they’ll be easier to acquire? Remember, Motorola used to make feature phones until two or three years ago. After they went all Android, they were bought up by Google. Nokia opening up a factory in Vietnam demonstrates that the company sees a future in feature phones, but are said phones going to be “Made by Nokia” or made by whatever company picks up the dumbphone unit?
Expect to hear more news about this on Thursday, when Nokia announces their Q1 2012 financial results, and most definitely by Monday, when this Vietnamese factory story is set to become official.
[Random Fact: Did you know that Nokia’s current flagship, the Lumia 900, is made in Korea?]