Microsoft's US$7.5b lesson in Nokia blunder

New York

MICROSOFT Corp, which reported its biggest-ever quarterly loss last week, wrote off US$7.5 billion on Nokia's phone unit, which it had bought a little over a year ago for what it said was US$9.5 billion.

Considering that the deal included US$1.5 billion in cash, the write-off means Microsoft now values a business that once controlled 41 per cent of the global handset market at just a small fraction of the purchase price.