Nokia shareholders voted today overwhelmingly in favour of selling the company's mobile business to US software giant Microsoft in an attempt to reinvent the once-proud Finnish telecoms titan.
According to Nokia -- which will now become a telecom equipment and services company -- the deal was almost unanimously approved (99.7 per cent) by a majority of shareholders voting ahead of an extraordinary meeting in Helsinki.
The "yes" vote was expected and analysts have judged the deal as positive for the ailing Finnish firm.
Nokia's share price has doubled since the plan was announced in early September with Microsoft agreeing to pay 5.44 billion euro (USD 7.35 billion) for the loss-making company's mobile phone division.
"It's an excellent deal. It's hard to imagine a better price for a division experiencing structural losses," Pierre Ferragu, an analyst at the brokers Sanford Bernstein, told AFP.
The sale of the assets, which include the Lumia smartphone trademark and technology, must take place in early 2014.
Once the world leader in mobile phones, Nokia lost its top place to South Korea's Samsung in 2012.
Although still number two in the overall mobile phone market with a 13.8 per cent market share in the third quarter of the year -- ahead of US giant Apple (6.7 per cent) -- Nokia is still far behind Samsung (25.7 per cent) and ranks eighth in the fast growing smartphone (internet enabled) market, according to technology consultancy Gartner.
The deal spells the end of the once iconic Nokia branded mobile handsets, which have experienced a spectacular fall in sales since the arrival of Apple's touchscreen iPhone in 2007.
The company's acting chief executive Risto Siilasmaa, said the decision was an emotional one but unavoidable.
"We are anyway convinced that having continued with the old strategy would in all likelihood have led to big difficulties for Nokia, its shareholders and employees," he told AFP.
