Nokia ditches Ovi in bid to strengthen core brand

Troubled mobile phone maker Nokia is to scrap the Ovi moniker, which covers mobile services such as maps, games and messaging, in an effort to strengthen its core brand and regain its former market dominance.

Nokia said in an official blog post that the move will begin during the summer, and reassured customers that nothing will change except the name.

"Starting with services on some of the new Nokia devices in July and August, Ovi services will be rebranded as Nokia services in a transition expected to continue into 2012," the company said.

"Each of the services under the Ovi umbrella will simply be rebranded as Nokia, with no planned disruption to the service roadmaps."

Nokia chief marketing officer Jerri DeVard added that the move will help the company to strengthen its brand in an increasingly competitive mobile market.

"By centralising our services identity under one brand, not two, we will reinforce the powerful brand of Nokia and unify our brand architecture," he said.

The company explained that customers buying a new Nokia smartphone or mobile phone towards the end of 2011 will see the new branding on services, while those that own Nokia devices already will see the changes through software updates.

Steve Hilton, from Analysys Mason, told V3.co.uk the move represented another step forward for Nokia from its old way of thinking and that now that it was in partnership with Microsoft it could let the Redmond firm deal with developers.

"I credit Nokia for scrapping a project that had its genesis in old thinking as Nokia and Microsoft see a way-forward together in mobility," he said.

"Microsoft is going to have a better time dealing with an application developer community than Nokia ever did."

Nokia announced in April that the Ovi Store had grown eight-fold over the past year to feature over 40,000 applications and five million downloads a day.

The decision marks yet another change in direction for the Finnish mobile firm, which has already agreed a partnership with Microsoft to use Windows Phone 7 as it seeks to regain the top spot in the mobile market from Android.

Nokia has also announced that 4,000 jobs will be lost in the UK, Finland and Denmark by the end of 2012 as new chief executive Stephen Elop makes his mark on the company.