The sad reign of the mobile phone king

Hey y’all, it’s Austin Carr in Boston. Google’s antitrust trial is a reminder of the foes it vanquished. But first…Three things you need to [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hey y’all, it’s Austin Carr in Boston. Google’s antitrust trial is a reminder of the foes it vanquished. But first… Three things you need to know today: • [More big companies]( pulled out of Web Summit over Israel comments • [Tesla tempered]( growth expectations, signaling trouble for EVs • [Google, Meta and Apple]( win US approval for new VR devices Snake wasn’t enough Throughout the [US Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Google](, lawyers and high-profile witnesses from the tech industry have sparred over decades of disruption. In the process, the speakers name-checked a sad list of once-mighty tech companies whose glory had faded. Among them: BlackBerry, LG, Motorola, AOL and Yahoo. The one with perhaps the hardest fall was Nokia. Last week, the Finnish giant [announced huge layoffs after posting disappointing earnings](. You likely haven’t thought much about the brand since playing Snake on the famously indestructible Nokia 3310, or perhaps you were one of the some 200 million who purchased the brickish 1100 handset in the early 2000s. Today, Nokia Oyj remains a struggling tech behemoth, mostly producing telecom equipment. The story of the brand’s decline provides a singular contrast with the rise of Google’s Android, easily the largest mobile operating system on the planet. “No one would have said in—call it circa 2007-2008—that Google could have created an operating system that would rival Nokia and Microsoft,” said Neeva Inc. cofounder Sridhar Ramaswamy, who testified about how his search startup was unable to compete with Google’s scale. “It was an unthinkable concept.” At the time, Nokia was arguably in the same dominant position in mobile as Google is now. In fact, just a few months after Apple Inc. released its original iPhone in 2007, Forbes put Nokia on its cover, noting it was selling more than 400 million handsets a year — more than Motorola, Samsung, and Sony combined. “One billion customers — can anyone catch the cell phone king?” the magazine wondered. The answer: yes. [Nokia was clobbered in the smartphone]( market in the coming years, as Google and Apple’s software and app stores took off. In 2013, in a desperate bid to promote its Windows mobile OS, Microsoft Corp. agreed to acquire Nokia’s devices and services business for $7 billion. During his testimony at the Google trial, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who wrote off the purchase in 2015, described the acquisition as a failed attempt to solidify its lowly third-place position in the smartphone wars. When Microsoft sold the assets to HMD Global Oy in 2016, there was briefly some [nostalgic excitement]( for a [once-beloved]( product, said Nabila Popal, research director for IDC. “The Nokia brand name was so big,” she said. But the revival faltered due high price points and meh features. Today [Nokia Oyj]( only licenses its name to HMD, which offers generic-looking tablets, speakers and earbuds; most of its sales volume is basic phones with physical keyboards, like a zombie version of Nokia’s old 3310 self. According to data from research firm IDC, HMD-Nokia ranks No. 11 in the overall mobile phone market ahead of Google’s in-house lineup, but only because that tally includes both smart and “dumb” devices — and Nokia sells tons of the latter, at an average of cost of $23 per phone. Even then, its market share in the second quarter dropped to 2.4%, perhaps one [reason why HMD announced last month]( it will start producing HMD-branded devices rather than just Nokia ones. With its licensing rights expected to expire in 2026, it could be only a matter of time before the former cell-phone king is no longer even dumb-phone royalty. The saga is a reminder that even tech’s mightiest can fall. —[Austin Carr](mailto:acarr54@bloomberg.net) The big story Most Airbnb rentals don’t meet NYC’s new application requirements, and short-term rentals in the city [fell 89% since August](. Get fully charged Foreign money managers are selling off [Chinese tech stocks](. The South Korean trade minister says the country will look for alternative sources of [a key material for EVs]( if China’s export control causes a graphite shortage. Video game company[FaZe Clan]( is being acquired by GameSquare Holdings, where Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is a top investor. More from Bloomberg Live event: The Bloomberg Technology Summit in London will host top technology leaders, business executives, innovators and entrepreneurs on Oct. 24. 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