BARCELONA, Spain — Investors have panned his shake-up strategy, and employees are rankled. Now, Nokia’s Stephen Elop, the first non-Finn to lead the world’s largest maker of phones, is in a hurry to justify his decision to ditch the company’s smartphone software in favor of a former employer’s, Microsoft.
He has a lot of ground to cover.
Nokia’s stock, which lost 14 percent after the Microsoft deal was announced Friday, fell by more than 5 percent Monday. Nokia employees showed their displeasure with the software switch Friday, using flex time to head home en masse.
Elop presented his case to both investors and employees at the world’s largest cellphone trade show, which opened Monday in Barcelona.
In a message to investors, Elop said Sunday that the deal means billions of dollars for Nokia from Microsoft, in addition to benefits such as lower software-development costs.
Elop, who is Canadian, discussed employee reactions during an interview with The Associated Press. “Every employee goes through an emotional journey, and the emotional journey is difficult because this is such a big change,” he said. “I’ve had 4½ months to go through my emotional journey, ending up in a very different position from what I had assumed when I first joined.”
Nokia has been losing market share to Apple, Google and others that have moved aggressively into the smartphone market. The company’s worldwide market share in smartphones was just over 30 percent in the fourth quarter, down from 40 percent a year earlier.
Microsoft launched a new phone-operating system, Windows Phone 7, late last year. Reviewers hailed it as big improvement over previous attempts, but so far, it hasn’t made a dent in the dominance of Google’s Android software and Apple’s iPhone.
