Nokia targets BlackBerry in battle for business mobile phone users

As Nokia, the erstwhile smartphone leader, fails to gain much headway on Apple and Samsung Electronics, the Finnish company is setting its sights on a weaker rival: BlackBerry.

Nokia is betting its partnership with corporate computing giant Microsoft will help it win business users, targeting BlackBerry's stronghold. Nokia's newest Lumia smartphones, including two introduced this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, run on Microsoft's operating system and come with Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

Gaining a foothold in the business market is crucial for Nokia as it fights BlackBerry for third place in smartphones, behind Samsung, the leader in devices using Google's Android, and Apple. Shares of Nokia and BlackBerry have lost 90 per cent in the past five years as consumers and companies have turned to Android and Apple's iOS.

"The importance of winning the business audience on a scale of one to 10 is easily an 11," said Ramon Llamas, an analyst at US research firm IDC. Llamas said he expected Windows Phone handsets to surpass BlackBerry this year, with Nokia responsible for most of the gains.

BlackBerry, formerly known as Research In Motion, pioneered the corporate mobile device market in North America and still has a strong following in Washington and on Wall Street.

Nokia, the biggest seller of Windows handsets, may appeal to information-technology chiefs seeking easy synchronisation between smartphones and company computers, which most often use Microsoft's operating system.

Nokia's chief executive Stephen Elop, who joined from Microsoft in 2010, started betting on his former employer's operating system after Nokia's homegrown Symbian software fell out of favour among consumers.