Nokia Chief Says No Plans for Merger With Microsoft

11:31 p.m. | Updated to correct reference to chip designer.

BARCELONA — Nokia and Microsoft, partners in smartphones, are not in talks about an equity partnership or a formal merger, the Nokia chief executive, Stephen Elop, said in an interview.

“My expectation is that it stays as a collaboration,’’ Mr. Elop, a former senior Microsoft executive, said at the opening of the Mobile World Congress, the industry’s annual convention. “There’s never been a discussion about anything else.’’

Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, and Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., announced their joint effort to make Windows smartphones in February 2011. Since then, they have produced four: the Lumia 800, the Lumia 710, the Lumia 900 and the Lumia 610. Speculation that the project would lead to a Microsoft takeover of Nokia has surfaced periodically, but has always been denied by both companies.

Despite what he calls an excellent working relationship, and the fact that “there are certain aspects of what Nokia does that are of great interest to Microsoft and vice versa,’’ Mr. Elop said there were no plans to explore deepening the relationship.

“There are many elements of Nokia that are unrelated to what we’re doing in smart devices,’’ Mr. Elop said. “Fully, broadly speaking, half of our business is on products and in markets and in areas which are not the area of focus for Microsoft as it relates to their devices strategy. So in terms of what it would mean to do something differently, it would be pretty complicated. So we don’t anticipate anything there.’’

Mr. Elop called the Lumia 610, which has a suggested retail price of 189 euros, or $251, a symbol of the cooperation between Nokia, Microsoft and Qualcomm, the San Diego company providing the chip processors for the Lumia lineup.

At Nokia’s request, Qualcomm designed a special chip for the 610 which requires only a quarter of the usual memory, 256 megabytes of dynamic random access memory, to deliver the same performance. The lower-cost chip allowed Nokia to trim the price of the 610, which goes on sale in April, by 30 percent from its predecessor, the Nokia 710.