For Nokia the past few years have been an abrupt downturn towards putting an end to its Symbian and MeeGo divisions, only to adapt its cost to a cut-throat competition. Now, Nokia decided to get rid of its media advertising business to focus more on its core business.

Reuters reports that Nokia shed its media advertising business to a startup from the United States, called Matchbin. A company spokesman announced the deal, but did not provide other details.

So far, we know that Matchbin renamed itself as Radiate Media, immediately after acquiring the Nokia business. Matchbin has been launched in 2008, in Salt Lake City, and has managed to build over 700 local media partnerships with aggregated website traffic seeing over 6 million unique visitors.

The company now serves more than 6,000 local merchant and national advertisers through its partners and in November last year it has bought Navteq Media Solutions’ Radio and TV Advertising Group.

For Nokia, shedding another division is part of CEO Stephen Elop’s strategy to focus more on the main business and improve the company’s position in the smartphone business. According to a report by Bloomberg, Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft seems to be delivering results as the company has managed to sell more smartphones last quarter than what analysts were expecting.

Espoo, a Finland – based company, said that in fourth quarter, Nokia sold 19.6 million smartphones, one million over what the analysts estimated. In comparison, Apple sold in the same period 37 million iPhones, but it still is an achievement for Nokia considering that over the past few years the company’s sales plummeted drastically.

Stephen Elop, CEO for Nokia, is confident that Nokia will be able to sell enough to compensate the decade of losing money with the Symbian line. But the market and the array of competitors, Nokia’s Windows based phones is not to be taken lightly. Apple, Samsung, Google and HTC are all competitors that will not wait for Nokia to set the pace.

Alexander Peterc, an Exane BNP Paribas analyst, explained “there might be a bit of relief there because people were very concerned after Apple results that Nokia would have to warn significantly more”. He continued mentioning that “it’s less about the quality of earnings themselves, and more to do with the relief that it’s not worse”.