Nokia re-organizes, regroups and hopes for results

Finnish phone maker Nokia is reinventing itself yet again, reorganizing its business units and reshuffling its executives in an attempt to pull itself together and make a concerted stand against its burgeoning competitors.
Nokia says it will be moving towards a more “simplified company structure,” dividing itself up into three key units; Mobile Solutions, Mobile Phones, and Markets.
As of July 1, Nokia’s Mobile Solutions group will be dealing exclusively with the higher end smartphone and mobile computing devices which run Symbian or Meego with Ovi Store services, whereas the Mobile Phones group will stick to handling the lower end, non-smartphone offerings, which are a key money maker for the firm, especially in the developing world.
Apparently the lower end mobile phone group will also be availing itself of the services division in the newly formed mobile solutions department to integrate Ovi tools into Nokia’s more basic phones too. These would apparently include Ovi Life Tools, Ovi Mail and Ovi Store itself.
The whole shift is meant to help Nokia better integrate its services with its phones – smart or otherwise – sort out its software bottlenecks and get its products launched quicker. To this end, the powers that be at Nokia have also decided to give each new unit its own quasi-autonomous management and staff, as well as R&D.
Speaking of management and staff, that too is currently in flux at Nokia, with several of the upper echelons being shifted around, the CFO resigning for apparently personal reasons and a new addition in the form of ex vice president for Sun Microsystems Richard Green becoming the new chief technology officer.
Nokia’s CFO Richard A. Simonson announced his surprise resignation on Tuesday, after only six months in the job and only a week after the end-of-fiscal-year shareholder meeting.
Simonson, who had been with Nokia for almost 10 years said he made the decision because the amount of travel he had to do for his job had become burdensome on his family.
Whoever replaces Simonson will be taking the financial helm at a less than idea time for the Finnish firm, as Nokia continues to take a beating in the US from the likes of HTC, Apple and phones using Google’s Android platform.
That isn’t to say the situation is hopeless, however, as Nokia retains its crown as mobile phone market share king on a global scale, with 40% of the worldwide handset market.
Perhaps the shake-up will help Nokia recover some of its US footing.