HMD Global
Finnish mobile phone manufacturer
HMD Global Oy (Human Mobile Devices) is a Finnish independent mobile phone manufacturer. The company is made up of the mobile phone business that the Nokia Corporation sold to Microsoft in 2014, then bought back in 2016 by former executives who formed HMD Global. HMD began marketing Nokia-branded smartphones and feature phones on 1 December 2016, through an exclusive licensing agreement, and began producing self-branded HMD phones in March 2024.
HMD formed a partnership with Google, and uses the Android operating system on their smartphones, originally under the Android One program, whereas HMD's feature phones use the Series 30+ platform as well as the more advanced KaiOS. Manufacturing is outsourced to Foxconn subsidiary FIH Mobile. Nokia has a stake in HMD, and remains a partner, setting mandatory requirements and providing patents and technologies, in return for royalty payments.
History
Context
Nokia was one of the largest global mobile phone and smartphone makers until it began to struggle in maintaining market leadership due to the rise of more innovative smartphone offerings from Apple, Samsung and Google. Due to various factors, Nokia was unable to maintain the popularity it once had back in the 2000s. Its initial partnership with Microsoft to use its operating system did not help either as Windows Phone's mobile app offerings were not as comprehensive as the ones available on Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
At this point of time, Nokia had a lineup of feature phones, and a range of low- to high-end smartphones under the Nokia Eseries, Microsoft Lumia and Nokia Asha product lines.
By the early 2010s, Nokia had lost major market share in the mobile phone market, and was overtaken by Apple and Samsung.
The public source identifies “HMD Global” as finnish mobile phone manufacturer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Global, Finnish and mobile.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24090301. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014, 2016 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMD Global” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.