A senior figure at Nokia licensee Human Mobile Devices (HMD) insisted there was still broad demand for feature phones sporting the Finnish giant’s logo years after the brand’s consumer heyday, while citing positive early progress with devices launched under its own name.

HMD SVP for Europe and ANZ James Robinson (pictured) told Mobile World Live the Nokia brand still had “huge demand” in the feature phone space, but when it came to smartphones its own name had been introduced partly in a bid to appeal to younger consumers.

He noted its research had uncovered “a lot of people who were buying Nokia smartphones were somewhat older, so we needed to actually address how do we get into a fresh young audience and that’s where the HMD brand came from”.

In the feature phone space, he pointed to good sales of Nokia-branded devices across numerous markets and demographics.

“The audience is really broad: we sold 2 million feature phones in India in one month. We have a huge audience across Africa, in the UK Eton [College] bought Nokia 105s…and they issued them [to students]”.

He also noted progress with basic devices being used for events including music festivals where smartphones might get damaged and as safer options for children, with parents one of its current target markets.

Nokia noted in its annual report for 2024 HMD signed an exclusive licensing agreement to use its brand in 2016 which expires “by March 2026”.

Figures released at the end of 2024 showed the Finnish vendor held a 10 per cent stake in HMD.

Discussing the relationship between the two and the current agreement, Robinson said Nokia is “a very good partner of ours” along with being a shareholder.

“I can’t really speculate about what happens beyond the end of the contract, other than there’s still huge demand for Nokia devices.”

Own brand progress
In recent years, the company has spread its wings beyond Nokia with a number of white label and partner releases including with Mattel, Heineken and FC Barcelona.

It also pushed feature and smartphones under its own brand.

Robinson said HMD was “quite pleased” in the own-brand push, with “some markets better than others”.

He noted there is “obviously a lot of competition in that sub-$500 space at the moment and it just takes time to build these brands”.

“The US has been outstanding”.

“In Kenya we’ve done more sales over there with the HMD brand than we’ve done on Nokia”.

“We’ve done better than expected and when we benchmark ourselves against other brands that have introduced products to markets like Europe, we’d be on par or better than their performance”.

He also noted “in India we’ve doubled our feature phone sales since we introduced the HMD brand. It just enables us to play in different channels or with different partners than we do with Nokia and that makes sense creates a bit more choice”.