Nokia to present its new devices on 19 March in London

Eric Lipchis

04 de March de 2020 (21:35 h.)

The announcement came on the same day that the company decided to terminate 148 jobs in Finland.

The smartphone maker and Nokia brand licensee HMD Global will hold a global launch event in London to introduce new Nokia phones on 19 March. HMD Global, like many other popular smartphone manufacturers, was expected to reveal its new phones at Barcelona Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2020 last month, but the cancellation of the expo forced HMD to change their upcoming device announcement plans.

Nearly three weeks later after the MWC cancellation, HMD's chief product officer, Juho Sarvikas has announced the upcoming event on Twitter. Sarvikas has accompanied his tweet with the message 'No Time To Wait', referring to the title of the next James Bond movie, 'No Time To Die', which will be released this year.

The short promo comes with a James Bond twist which hints at a possible collaboration with the popular movie franchise. The brand is planning to launch 'James Bond 007 edition' Kevlar cases for the Nokia 6.2 and Nokia 7.2 phones. Whether or not a new 'James Bond 007 edition' phone will debut at the event in London, remains to be seen, according to NokiaPowerUser.

No time to wait

The announcement have been done on the same day that Nokia communicate its decision of terminating 148 jobs in Finland. The decision is part of an expansive savings plan that started in 2018. The goal of the programme is to save money from operations worldwide by the end of 2020. In fact, 280 jobs were already terminated in 2019.

Foreigner.fi informed last week about the difficult situation of the company and the plans for asset sales and a possible merge with Ericsson. Nokia suffered very much on the past year, partly because the company have not been able to adequately incorporate Alcatel-Lucent SA, its last major acquisition.

However, the main problem has been that the former Chief Executive Officer Rajeev Suri was not capable to develop properly the 5G technology and benefit from the recent international problems of Huawei. As a result, Nokia's shares lost a third of their value in comparison to 2019.