World's largest cellphone maker Nokia and software giant Microsoft will form a broad strategic partnership, a move that will help them to fight stiff competition from rivals Apple and Google in the smartphone market.

The partnership, announced on Friday, would see Nokia adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone as its main smartphone platform.

The two entities would form a "broad strategic partnership that would use their complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem," Nokia said in a statement.

Both companies have good presence in India.

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Faced with intense competition from Apple and Google, the Finnish major has seen its smartphone market share going down in recent times.

The latest partnership move comes a few months after a former Microsoft veteran Stephen Elop took over the reins of Nokia.

According to the statement, Nokia would contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a wide range of price points, market segments and geographies.

Apart from using Microsoft's Bing search engine across its devices and services, Nokia would also collaborate on joint marketing initiatives.

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"Nokia and Microsoft will combine our strengths to deliver an ecosystem with unrivalled global reach and scale. It's now a three-horse race," Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop said.

Microsoft CEO Steven A Ballmer said the partnership provides incredible scale, vast expertise in hardware and software innovation and a proven ability to execute.

Further, Nokia Maps would be a core part of Microsoft's mapping services and the software giant's development tools would be used to create applications to run on Nokia Windows Phones.