In early 2000, Nokia was at the most luminary position in terms of mobile phone market. However, within a decade, Nokia was uprooted from the mainstream market due to numerous reasons. In 2013, Microsoft acquired Nokia for $7.9 Billion, to provide Windows Operating System for the Nokia mobile hardware and it was hoped that Nokia shall revive its market position. Microsoft invested in Nokia with the aim of providing hardware for its Operating System. However, as rightly shown by the visualization shows below, Microsoft spent billions on a sinking ship.
The figure depicts the Nokia mobile phone sales from 2010. When Microsoft announced the strategic partnership in 2011, the global sales of the Nokia mobile phones was 105M. When the partnership was materialized in 2013, it fell drastically to 61M. Further, towards the completion of the acquisition in 2014, Nokia’s ship had already sunk with the global sales to a meagre 40M only. This depicts a sales dip of 62% in just 3 years. Leading this, Microsoft announced acquisition impairment charges of $7.6B.
Microsoft is the leader the Desktop OS, but it completely failed to integrate its software to Nokia’s hardware. Hence, Microsoft could not revive Nokia’s sinking ship even after being the market leader in desktop OS.
Source:https://www.statista.com/chart/4848/nokia-and-microsoft-mobile-phone-sales/
It is a good self-explained visualization. Acquiring Nokia was not a smart strategy for Microsoft. This visualization is not only presents Nokia’s market performance but also points “milestones” of Microsoft’s decision on Nokia. The blog writing about the data explanation is also very clear.