Antti Aimo-Koivisto/Lehtikuva, via Agence France-Presse â Getty Images  Nokiaâs shareholder meeting in Helsinki, Finland.  HELSINKI, Finland â Nokiaâs shareholders took a major step on Tuesday to reshape the company, voting overwhelmingly in favor of selling the companyâs handset business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion.  The approval represents one of the final steps before Microsoft takes control of the struggling cellphone division, which is expected early next year. But it also leaves many questions about what is in store for Nokia, a Finnish company that still lies at the heart of Europeâs technology industry.  âItâs been a very challenging period,â Risto Siilasmaa, Nokiaâs chairman and interim chief executive, said in a recent interview. âWhen I became chairman, I didnât think this was going to be a possibility. There have been a lot of emotions.â  The handset unit â which sold 64.6 million phones in the third quarter of 2013 â is still one of the worldâs largest. But it has increasingly lost out to rivals like Samsung and Apple that now dominate the lucrative smartphone market.  After pioneering mobile phone technology throughout the 1990s, Nokia became the worldâs largest handset maker with a market value of around $250 billion. It had nearly a 40 percent share of the global smartphone market as late as 2009, according to Gartner, the research company.  But Nokiaâs market share has quickly dwindled to less than 4 percent of global smartphone sales, and Samsung is the worldâs largest phone maker. The companyâs market value stands at roughly $30 billion, or just 12 percent of its record high.  âItâs a sad moment, but we have to look forward,â said Michael Halbherr, who leads Here, Nokiaâs mapping business, which will remain part of the company. âThe type of culture we had at Nokia created success, but it didnât do enough to succeed in the smartphone era.â  Despite the companyâs recent lackluster performance in the cellphone market, Nokia still has a few tricks up its sleeve as it contemplates the future. Senior executives at the company are completing a strategy, due early next year, that is expected to focus on Nokiaâs remaining businesses and be supported, at least in part, by the cash from the handset sale.  The plans are likely to include a networking unit that competes with companies like Ericsson of Sweden and Huawei of China to build high-speed mobile data infrastructure for large carriers, including Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. While the business began as a joint venture with Siemens, Nokia bought the 50 percent that it did not already own for $2.2 billion earlier this year.  The company has also held on to its mapping division, whose technology is in about 80 percent of the automotive navigation systems worldwide. It also controls an intellectual property portfolio that could either be licensed to other companies or used to build new products.  âWe are in a unique situation,â Henry Tirri, Nokiaâs chief technology officer, said in an interview. âBefore, we only thought about fitting our technology into mobile devices because that was our main business. Now, we have kept our technological assets and can use them where we see opportunities.â  Analysts warn, however, that creating a viable business from the three separate divisions, which are run independently, could prove a challenge.  Nokiaâs networking division, for example, will generate over 90 percent of the companyâs revenue after the handset sale is completed. With little overlap with the companyâs mapping unit, some investors have called on the firm to sell, or spin off, the smaller unit so that it can prioritize its core networking operations.  âThese are very different business,â said Sylvain Fabre, a Gartner telecoms analyst in London. âItâs hard to see how they could create connections between them.â  Other shareholders have demanded that Nokia return some of the almost 8 billion euros, or $10.8 billion, in cash that Nokia will have after it completes the sale of its handset division.  This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:  An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the responsibilities of Nokiaâs chief technology officer. He does not manage the companyâs intellectual property.
Shareholders approved a $7.2 billion sale of Nokiaâs cellphone business to Microsoft, leaving the company with its networking and mapping units, and its patents.