October 4, 2023

HMD Global starts manufacturing in Europe with the ‘Made in Hungary’ Nokia XR21 5G phone

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HMD Global, the phone maker and marketer behind the Nokia mobile phone brand, has launched its very first smartphone manufactured in Europe.

‘Unfortunately, due to our customers being in various security-conscious industries, we’re not allowed to tell anyone which countries we are producing these devices in, simply to keep it as secure as possible,’ HMD Global chief marketing officer Lars Silberbauer said at the time.

However, the company has now seemingly had second thoughts on that, and it has confirmed at least one of its manufacturing locations is in Hungary.

The first device off the line is the limited edition 5G Nokia XR21, of which only 50 have been made initially — with 30 going on sale through the Nokia phone store today. The device, which was launched in a different consumer-grade guise earlier this year, is available in ‘Frosted Platinum’ in the U.K., France, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Finland, with a sticker price of €699 (£599).

Additionally, the company said it will make a further 302 of the smartphones available to buy for consumers under the ‘European Edition’ branding. These will be available ‘soon,’ and will cost €649 (£549).

By way of a brief recap, HMD Global emerged from the ashes of Microsoft’s ill-conceived Nokia devices acquisition a decade ago, a move that spawned a $7 billion ‘good will’ writedown following Satya Nadella’s promotion to the CEO hotseat. Microsoft eventually shed the entire Nokia business, with the newly established HMD Global taking on the Nokia brand in 2016.

In the intervening years, HMD Global has largely focused on feature phones and budget smartphones, but the brand value of Nokia has helped the Helsinki company raise $330 million in funding from the likes of Google, Qualcomm, and Nokia itself. But just last month, HMD Global confirmed plans to bring own-brand devices to market too, which will sit alongside its Nokia-branded handsets — though it hasn’t revealed any specifics around these plans. 

Rationale

HMD Global hasn’t revealed much in the way of new specs for the device beyond what was already in the existing XR21, but it seems that durability and sustainability is the name of the game — from a marketing perspective, at least. The company touts the XR21’s ‘military-grade durability’ replete with IP69K rating, meaning that it is designed for industrial use-cases where there may be high-risk of dust, heat, moisture, and impact, while it also says the device is made from 100% recycled aluminium.

It’s worth noting that the materials themselves will still have to come from elsewhere in the world, most notably China where the various metals and components will still originate before shipping to HMD Global’s manufacturing facility in Europe for assembly, calibration, and testing.

Indeed, one of the main reasons HMD Global is bringing manufacturing closer to home is the security requirements from enterprises that it’s courting as customers. The company transitioned its data centers to Europe back in 2019 for this very same reason, and part of this will also involve designing and testing the phone locally from the get-go. The company says:

Today’s news doesn’t signal the start of a giant ‘lift and shift’ from its existing manufacturing capacity in China and India to Europe — it wouldn’t make a whole heap of sense to build all its phones in Europe only to ship them back to Asia, which is a significant market for the company. HMD Global has been clear that this is all about catering to a very specific demand from a very specific set of customers where sovereignty and localization are paramount.

Reference: https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/03/nokia-hmd-global-europe-smartphone/

Ref: techcrunch

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