European debt crisis? What about the growing European mobile crisis?

Don't get even, get angry (birds). And lots of them.

On September 29, Nokia announced the planned closure of their handset factory in Cluj, Romania. Manufacturing would be moved to other Nokia plants, especially those in China. To me this site closure was the exclamation mark on the de-Europeanization of the mobile industry. It's headed West. It's headed East. But it's not staying in the middle.

Back in the GSM heyday, in the mid-'90s, Europe became the center of the mobile world. Countries such as Sweden and Finland would brag of mobile penetration rates of greater than 25%, then 50% of the population.

And development happened on the Continent. Handset vendors and component suppliers of all sorts would gather in cities in France and the Netherlands, and other reasonably nice places across Europe to work on and influence wireless standardization, and mingle with the big European vendors and operators. There was Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, Philips, Alcatel. There was ETSI and GSM. Those were glorious days for Europe. It was the center of the new mobile world as Europeans looked with pity and scorn at the U.S., a country with networks that could barely handle text messaging at the time. The U.S was in the the mobile dark ages.

I always liked to say, when it comes to mobile trends, Japanese teenagers do it first. But it truly happens big in Europe.

Now welcome to the new mobile century. Let's look at where things stand now:

All major smartphone platforms are from the U.S. (iOS, Android, WP). Symbian has thrown its hands up in defeat. (We could debate about RIM/QNX, Bada, here as well.)

Approximately 95% of handset industry profits are earned by vendors outside of Europe (using Q2 2011 numbers).

More than 80% of industry revenues are generated by non-European vendors. (I include half of Sony Ericsson's revenues in my calculations.)

Only 1.5 of the world's top-ten vendors are European (Nokia and Sony Ericsson.)

Standardization efforts are shifting to organizations such as W3C and IETF, as services take center stage.

About 95% of all handsets are manufactured outside of Europe.

European consumers upgrade their handsets at a slower pace than consumers in the U.S. and most key Asian countries.

America has become the center of mobile software and services. There's Android, there's iOS, there's Windows Phone and Facebook and Google and Foursquare. And not only does Asia have key handset vendors such as Samsung, HTC, LG, they also have the world's largest mobile manufacturing based out of China. There's Foxconn (a Taiwan-based company). There's Compal (a Taiwan-based company).

To be fair and clear, there certainly are fantastic on-going European success stories: ARM comes to mind. [I could also add Opera, Spotify, and Skype here.] And Nokia is still the world's largest handset maker in pure volume terms. And of course there's Finland-based Rovio, the maker of "Angry Birds."

But it will take a lot of angry birds to make up for lost opportunities. It seems that mobile development has flown the coop.

Is the sun setting on mobile Europe?