It’s been a long time since there was much interesting to say about Nokia smartphones. HMD Global, the Finnish firm that produces Nokia-branded handsets these days, is a big hitter in the world of low-cost “feature phones,” but it’s firmly buried in the “other” category when it comes to global smartphone shipments.
However, HMD—not to be confused with Nokia, the telecommunications-equipment manufacturer—just made a couple of smartphone announcements that are worth flagging for how they play into wider trends.
The first is about the new Nokia G22, which is a pretty standard affordable Android phone, except for one thing: You can remove the back to replace certain components if they break. HMD has partnered with iFixit for this, and people in Europe and Australia can easily buy replacement screens, batteries, and charge ports for the G22 to install themselves.
To a certain extent, this gives sustainability-minded European consumers a cheaper alternative to the Fairphone, which is also designed for easy repairability. Fairphone makes way more of its components replaceable—you can even swap out the cameras and loudspeakers in the Dutch firm’s devices—but it does seem the idea is spreading. EU lawmakers are pushing for this to become standard practice, by the way, but the European Commission hasn’t yet produced the “right to repair” proposal they’ve requested.
Meanwhile, with security and sustainability benefits in mind, HMD is taking its “first steps in a journey to become the first major global smartphone provider to bring manufacturing to Europe.” Cool! Where in Europe? “We’re not allowed to say which countries,” said chief marketing officer Lars Silberbauer in a slightly frustrating briefing last week. That’s for security reasons, apparently.
What are the security benefits of onshoring some production from China and India? Again, no details because of security, but a “critical part” of the manufacturing process will happen in Europe, because some of HMD’s European customers want to be “able to visit these factories and see how it’s being produced.”
HMD already moved its data centers to Finland several years ago, to stay in line with EU privacy laws that demand the protection of Europeans’ personal data when it’s sent across the world (hi, U.S.). This latest move isn’t entirely analogous—Silberbauer told TechCrunch that HMD saw a “growth opportunity for the European market” and that existing production sites wouldn’t be affected—but it’s clear the company sees security and data-protection compliance as a differentiator in Europe. The first stage of the manufacturing shift will involve HMD’s Chinese partner shipping over components for European assembly, calibration, and testing, including security testing.
It remains to be seen whether any of HMD’s peers follow suit, but this is certainly the sort of development that Europe’s leaders are eager to see in their quest to achieve “digital sovereignty.” Silberbauer also told Reuters that “while we can’t discuss specific European subsidies, we collaborate with multiple parties in both the public and private sector in Europe to advocate for European manufacturing and R&D.”
This is all part of the same overall narrative that we’re seeing with the U.S. CHIPS Act, which is about to start doling out $39 billion in “manufacturing incentives” for local semiconductor production (the EU is poised to follow suit on that front, too). There’s suddenly a ton of money sloshing around, and, slowly, the tech world is starting to fragment.
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David Meyer
