NOKIA HISTORYNokia Corporation (NYSE: NOK) is the world's largest manufacturer of mobile telephones (as of June 2006), with a global market share of approximately 33% in 2006. It produces mobile phones for every major market and protocol, including GSM, CDMA, and WCDMA (UMTS); although in 2006, it decided to withdraw from the CDMA market.
The corporation also produces telecommunications network equipment for applications such as mobile and fixed-line voice telephony, ISDN, broadband access, voice over IP, and wireless LAN. However, in June 2006, Siemens and Nokia announced that they would transfer their network equipment manufacturing to a new, commonly-owned company to be called Nokia Siemens Networks, leaving the parent corporation (almost?) purely a mobile telephone manufacturer.
Nokia's headquarters are in Espoo, a suburb of Helsinki, Finland, but it has R&D, manufacturing, and sales representation sites in many countries throughout the world. Nokia Research Center, the corporation's industrial research laboratories, has sites in Helsinki and in Cambridge, MA, USA.
Nokia is by far the largest Finnish company, accounting for about half of the market capitalization of the Helsinki Stock Exchange; a unique situation for an industrialized country. It also plays a very large role in the economy of Finland, and Finns have ranked it many times as the best Finnish brand and employer.
History
Nokia was established in 1865 as a pulp mill by the Finland-Swede Knut Fredrik Idestam on the banks of Nokia rapids. Finnish Rubber Works established its factories in the beginning of 20th century nearby and began using Nokia as its brand. Shortly after World War I Finnish Rubber Works acquired Nokia wood mills as well as Finnish Cable Works, a producer of telephone and telegraph cables. All these three companies were merged into the Nokia Corporation in 1967.
The Nokia corporation that was created in the 1967 fusion was involved in many sectors, producing at one time or another paper products, bicycle and car tyres, footwear (including Wellington boots), personal computers, communications cables, televisions, electricity production, etc.
The seeds of the current incarnation of Nokia were planted with the founding of the electronics section of the cable division in the 1960s. In the 1967 fusion, that section was separated into its own division, and began manufacturing telecommunications equipment.
In the 1970s, Nokia became more involved in the telecommunications industry by developing the Nokia DX 200, a digital switch for telephone exchanges. In 1982, a DX 200 switch became the world's first digital telephone switch to be put into operational use. The DX 200 became the workhorse of the network equipment division. Its modular and flexible architecture enabled it to be developed into various switching products.
For a while in the 1970s, Nokia's network equpment production was separated into Telefenno, a company jointly owned by the parent corporation and by a company owned by the Finnish state.
In the 1980s, Nokia produced a series of personal computers called MikroMikko [3]. However, the PC division was sold to ICL, which later became part of Fujitsu. That company later transferred its personal computer operations to Fujitsu-Siemens AG, which shut down its only factory in Finland around 2000 (?), thus ending large-scale PC manufacturing in the country.
Nokia's first major mobile phone order came from the Finnish defence forces in 1972, for field radios. In the 1970s, Nokia began developing mobile phones for the NMT network standard, that went online in the 1980s. It was the world's first mobile telephony standard that enabled international roaming, and provided valuable experience for Nokia for its close participation in developing Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). It is a digital standard which came to dominate the world of mobile telephony in the 1980s and 1990s, in mid-2006 accounting for about two billion mobile telephone subscribers, or about 80% percent of the total, in more than 200 countries. The world's first commercial GSM call was made in 1991 in Helsinki over a Nokia-supplied network, using Nokia phones.
In the 1980s, during the era of its CEO Kari Kairamo, Nokia expanded aggressively into new fields, mostly by acquisitions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the corporation ran into serious financial problems, a major reason being its heavily loss-making television division. (These problems probably contributed to Kairamo taking his own life in 1988.) Nokia responded by streamlining its telecommunications divions, and by divesting itself of the television and PC divisions. Jorma Ollila, who became the CEO in 1992, made a strategic decision to concentrate solely on telecommunications. Thus, during the rest of the 1990s, Nokia continued to divest itself of all of its non-telecomms divisions.
The exploding worldwide popularity of mobile telephones, beyond even Nokia's most optimistic predictions, caused a logistics crisis in the mid-1990s. This prompted Nokia to overhaul its entire logistics operation. Logistics continues to be one of Nokia's major advantages over its rivals, along with greater economies of scale.
In 2004, the troubles of the networks equipment division caused the corporation to resort to similar streamlining practices on that side, with layoffs and organizational restructuring. This, however, diminished Nokia's public image in Finland, and produced a number of court cases along with at an episode critical towards Nokia of a documentary television show [4].
Despite these occasional crises, Nokia has been phenomenally successful in its chosen field. This growth has come mostly during the era of Jorma Ollila and his team of about half a dozen close colleagues. In June 2006, this era came to a close with Ollila leaving the CEO position to become the chairman of Shell. The new CEO of Nokia is Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the last remaining member of Ollila's team.
On 19 June 2006 Nokia and Siemens AG announced the companies are to merge their mobile and fixed-line phone network equipment businesses to create one of the world's biggest network firms. Both companies will have a 50% stake in the infrastructure company, to be headquartered in the Helsinki area, and to be called Nokia Siemens Networks. The companies predict annual sales of 16 billion euros and cost savings of 1.5 billion euros a year by 2010. About 20,000 Nokia employees will be transferred to this new company.
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Corporate culture
Nokia's official corporate culture manifesto, The Nokia Way, emphasises the speed and flexibility of decision-making in a flat, networked organization, although despite best intentions, the corporation's size necessarily imposes a certain amount of bureaucracy. Equality of opportunities and openness of communication are also stressed, along with management leadership and employee participation.
Nokia is a progressive and forward-thinking mobile technology group that spends a significant amount of its turnover on research and development, and prides itself on often being the first to market with new products and applications.
The official language of Nokia is English. All documentation is written in English, and it's used in spoken communication and e-mails among colleagues whenever it's their only common language.
The Nokia Values are Customer Satisfaction, Respect, Achievement, and Renewal.
? The name of the town of Nokia originated from the river which flowed through the town. The river itself was named after the old Finnish word originally meaning sable, later pine marten. A species of small black marten was once found in the region, but it is now extinct.
? The proper pronunciation of "Nokia" according to Finnish phonology is ['no.ki.a], with stress on the first syllable, and all vowels short. English speakers often mispronounce the name as something like /nou.ki.ə/ (mistaking the Finnish short 'o'
- for the English "long O" [əυ]) or /nak'kii.ə/ (misplacing stress and mistaking the short 'i' for a "tense I" [ii]).
? The "Special" tone available to users of Nokia phones when receiving SMS (text messages) is actually Morse code for "SMS". Similarly, the "Ascending" SMS tone is Morse code for "Connecting People," Nokia's slogan.
? The ringtone "Nokia tune" is actually based on a 19th-century guitar work named "Gran Vals" by Spanish musician Francisco T?rrega. The Nokia Tune was originally named "Grande Valse" on Nokia phones but was changed to "Nokia Tune" around 1998 when it became so well known that people referred to it as the Nokia Tune.
? Nokia is sometimes called aikon (Nokia backwards) by non-Nokia mobile phone users and by mobile software developers, because "aikon" is used in various SDK software packages, including Nokia's own Symbian S60 SDK.
? Nokia sponsored several pan-European Alternate Reality Games from 1999 to 2005, under the name Nokia Game. These were used to promote their latest phones, as well as introducing the ARG format to Europe.
? Nokia was listed as the 20th most admirable company worldwide in Fortune's list of 2006 (1st in network communications, 4th non-US company). See [5]
? Nokia is currently the world's largest camera manufacturer, as the sales of its camera-equipped mobile phones have exceeded those of any conventional camera manufacturer.
? Nokia is in direct competition with Samsung Electronics, Kyocera, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, among others.
