Pekka Rantala, the former chief executive officer of the Finnish Angry Birds developer Rovio, is going to be part of the team which looks to reintroduce Nokia phones to the market. Namely, Rantala has joined HMD Global, another Finnish company which recently acquired a global license to manufacture Nokia-branded mobile phones and tablets for the next decade. The firm announced that Rantala has accepted the position of a chief marketing officer who’ll be responsible for making the Nokia brand relevant again in the smartphone industry.
Rantala stepped down from his position as Rovio’s CEO in late 2015 after overseeing significant job cuts which resulted in over 200 employees losing their jobs and restructuring the entire company. Rantala is also well-acquainted with the Nokia brand seeing how he used to work for the company from 1994 to 2011. He spent the last three years of his Nokia career as a senior vice president of marketing after which he moved to the food and beverages industry managing brands like Fazer and Hartwell. In the last two years, Rantala served as a board member of JOT Automation, a Finnish wireless technology company. All in all, he’s a veteran executive and marketing professional with a lot of experience in the tech industry.
Nokia sold its phone business to Microsoft in 2014 and is now almost exclusively focused on manufacturing telecommunications equipment. Since then, the US tech giant has pretty much abandoned its acquisition and has recently announced the sale of the remnants of Nokia’s feature phone business to FIH Mobile, a Foxconn Technology subsidiary which is tasked with manufacturing and distributing upcoming Nokia-branded smartphones and tablets. Other than that, not much else is currently known about this endeavor. Just to clear up any possible confusion, HMD Global is a fairly new company which was created only three months ago and largely thought to have been created for the sole purpose of bringing the Nokia brand back into the consumer electronics game. There’s still no word on when exactly these new Nokia phones and tablets will appear on the market, but the rumors and speculation that has been forming of late seem to highly suggest the first official announcements could come through as early as the fall.