Nokia boss Stephen Elop has strongly denied fresh rumours that the company is set to sell off its smartphone division to Microsoft, suggesting that controversial Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin is fuelling the rumours in a bid for attention.
In an interview with PCMag, Elop said such speculation was “baseless” and made no sense in the context of Nokia's longer-term plans for the future.
Elop didn't mention Murtazin by name, but there's no doubt his comments were aimed squarely at the headline-grabbing “mobile insider”, who has insisted for the best part of a year now that a move is being engineered behind the scenes.
“The rumours are baseless, and some people who seem to enjoy generating rumours are running out of fresh material, so it seems to have come up again,” Elop commented.
“There’s significant synergies between the multiple groups within Nokia – for example, on decisions around chipsets, on memory, on different display technologies. We gain scale advantages across the entire portfolio of devices that we have.”
Elop can certainly talk a good game, but talk is cheap and the rumours simply aren't going to go away until Nokia's Windows Phone range starts to build some momentum. And so far the jury's out on whether that will ever happen.
