Nokia’s retreat comes in a booming market. Smartphone shipments grew 43 percent in the third quarter.
Stephen Elop, Nokia’s chief executive, is not despairing, and he has a turnaround strategy. The game plan is coherent and ambitious, but its success is not assured.
The opening for Nokia, Mr. Elop explained, depends on Nokia’s ability to exploit the rapidly shifting market in smartphones, to profit from its new alliance with Microsoft and to develop services based on its own assets, like the company’s advanced mapping and location data technology.
“There is tremendous opportunity for differentiation,” Mr. Elop said Monday in an interview.
The difference, said Mr. Elop, who joined the Finnish phone maker from Microsoft just over a year ago, starts with Microsoft’s new Windows Phone operating system. The well-reviewed software presents the user with large touchscreen tiles, which can be tailored to collect all the communications — e-mail, Twitter, Facebook — from a person’s family or spouse, for example.
