FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, is buying the feature phone business from Microsoft for $350 million. According to the deal, Microsoft would hand over the rights to use the Nokia brand, feature phone software, services, and other contracts and supply agreements to FIH Mobile and 4,500 employees would also be transfer over to Foxconn’s subsidiary.

HMD Global, a newly created company that will produce and sell a range of Android smartphoens and tablets, if the company that Nokia is now planning to license its brand to.

Microsoft’s feature phone business, which is currently still using the Nokia brand for basic phone would only be impacted by the deal with FIH Mobile.  Microsoft says that it will continue to support Lumia phones and Windows Phone devices from partners like Acer, Alcatel, HP, Trinity and VAIO and will also continue to develop Windows 10 Mobile.

Over the past couple of years, Microsoft has been winding down its feature phone business. Microsoft has not added any new features or updates to the Asha, Series 40, and Nokia X handsets ever since July 2014 when all the models and versions were all shifted to a “maintenance mode”.

In a move to tempt its installed base of feature and Symbian users over to its own mobile software, Microsoft switched its phone business focus solely to Windows Phone. However with a massive 73 percent drop from the 8.6 million in the first quarter period last year, Microsoft sold only 2.3 million Lumia devices in the same period this year indicating a failure of its strategy.

Focusing on flagships, low-cost devices, and business phones, Microsoft had shifted its mobile strategy nearly a year ago. Windows Phone is not the companys focus this year, Microsoft’s head of Windows, Terry Myerson, had previously admitted.

Microsoft is “fully committed” to mobile devices, but that “if you wanted to reach a lot of phone customers, Windows Phone isn’t the way to do it,”, Myerson had said in an interview with The Verge earlier this year. In an internal e-mail that was circulated within the company last month, Myerson had reiterated Microsoft’s “commitment to the mobile space”.

Microsoft may be focusing on a Surface Phone launch next year are the rumors that are making the rounds at present and the rumors are quite strong. Rumors are that it is highly unlikely that one would witness another phone launch this year with the Lumia label as the company has reportedly shelved its Lumia branding.

Other phone makers are left to shoulder the burden to help try and push Windows Phone in the right direction since Microsoft has sold off its feature phone business and has reduced the production and sale of handsets under the Lumia brand.

Over the last five years, consumer spending has been focused on iOS and Android handsets and hence the attempts by Microsoft to convince phone makers to build a significant amount of Windows Phone devices over the same period have failed.

(Adapted from The Verge)

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