This new board would take on many of the responsibilities of the supervisory board and sit just above the management board. The timing was also good, as the US and the UK had just set the tone for the deregulation of the telecom market. Nokia had a distinct advantage, as it owned all the pieces of the puzzle for end-to-end solutions — switches, base stations, and handsets.
However, a group of managers analyzed the market opportunities brought by liberalization and digitization, and concluded the company was not organized properly to take advantage of them. She recommended the creation of Nokia Mobile Phones NMP — a separate business unit that would focus on mobile handsets, as she anticipated they would soon become more than simple network terminals.
The remaining businesses — base stations and digital switches — would be merged into a second unit called Nokia Cellular Systems. Technophone was the first company to come up with a phone that was small enough to fit in your pocket, and was the second larger seller of handsets in Europe after Nokia.
It also owned an extensive list of patents and employed many talented engineers, which is how it was able to achieve enough vertical integration to make phones almost entirely in-house. This was one of its main competitive advantage — Motorola could easily create lighter, more compact phones. Ericsson was one of the forces in the network equipment market, and unlike Motorola it acknowledged the potential of digital communications.
However, the two firms had something in common — both saw handsets as dumb terminals and infrastructure equipment as the most important component of future developments in the telecom arena. This is why in Ericsson moved its phone business into a joint venture with General Electric in the US, only to buy it back five years later. Around , Nokia understood the importance of a more consolidated approach in achieving its dream to become a global product company with a consumer focus.
This meant that every new product Nokia envisioned was to be developed by engineers that worked more closely with logistics, manufacturing, and marketing teams. Furthermore, it allowed the company to bring partners into the research and development process, which later enabled the slew of phone form factor experiments to be produced with incredible efficiency.
At the time, McGovern was one of the few people at Nokia that had valuable experience working in a multinational firm with manufacturing expertise. As a result, from to the Finnish company went from making , phones per year to around five million, and from reporting an operating loss to posting a healthy profit of FIM 3.
It was also in that saw the Nokia board decide it was time to begin divesting the businesses that were not related to this new direction. The work environment cultivated by the new CEO was very attractive despite the relatively low wages, as engineers would get regular job rotations that reduced internal political friction and allowed them to gain valuable technical skills.
Ollila knew that Nokia had little room for error with its international expansion, but his willingness to take a novel and unconventional approach would soon turn the company from a small telecom company grown from the ashes of a financially troubled industrial conglomerate into one of the biggest innovators in mobile phones and telecom infrastructure. Nokia went on to build a strong relationship with suppliers throughout the US and Europe and built several factories in China and Mexico.
It had a brick shape with a short, extendable antenna on the top and was 45 mm thick, weighing grams, which at the time was considered thin and light. It had a small monochrome LCD screen and was able to hold 99 contacts in memory, while its mAh battery would only last for 90 minutes of talk time or around 15 hours of standby time.
It had a scrolling text menu, and the screen displayed battery and signal levels, a notification symbol for unread SMS messages, and more. Other notable features were the ability to display a list of 10 last dialed numbers, last 10 received calls, and the last 10 missed calls. The battery allowed between 70 to minutes of talk time and 20 to 40 hours of standby.
However, the company lost control of its supply chain that year as it quickly found it could no longer meet demand, which far exceeded the , phones a year that Ollila thought would be a realistic target back in This new system was fully operational in just six months, which gave NMP control back over its supply chain. To get an idea of the impact it had, inventory cycles were shortened from to 68 days, inventory costs per unit were reduced by 50 percent, and the main Nokia phone manufacturing plant in Salo, Finland went from taking several months to add a production line to establishing one at full capacity in less than a week.
By the end of the s, Nokia launched its first smartphone, the Nokia Communicator. However, both failed in the market due to their high price and being ahead of their time. This type of device that borrowed features that computers could do inside a portable brick, while also featuring a QWERTY keyboard was only starting to emerge, and it would take several years for them to become appealing for the average consumer.
When unfolded, it would reveal a 4. The Nokia also sported a rudimentary web browser. The company improved on this original concept with a few subsequent models, the first of which arrived in in the form of the Nokia and i.
These utilized a faster AMD Elan SC CPU running at 33 MHz, weighed only half as much as the Nokia , and dealt with many of the annoyances of the original, including the need for a special adapter for both charging and connecting to a computer. It even included an MMC slot for expandable storage. One of the reasons why Nokia was pouring so many resources into rapid iteration on data-enabled phones was that its leadership at the time realized the future potential of a pocketable device that covered both business and consumer use.
Then there was the perceived competitive threat from other companies like Apple and IBM, who had previously failed to find the right recipe but could always come up with a new and refined version. Nokia executives also caught wind that Microsoft was seeking to forge partnerships with device manufacturers and mobile carriers to bring Windows to mobile devices. Image credit: PhoneArena. By comparison, Communicator devices were a more complex endeavor that required a much of the resources dedicated into developing and maintaining an operating system with a graphical interface, various applications, and supporting a variety of networking standards.
Despite growing popular in Europe, the first Communicator phones were a niche product in the US, as Nokia failed to convince carriers to switch over to the GSM standard. On the software side, the company quickly realized after the experience of the Nokia and that it had to switch from the resource-hungry GEOS to a more efficient mobile operating system. That OS was EPOC, a bit operating system developed by a company based in UK called Psion, and an ambitious project that would form the basis for something much bigger in the coming years.
Ericsson and Motorola were similarly concerned of the potential impact on their businesses, so together with Nokia they created a joint venture called Symbian to develop an open mobile operating system that would provide equal opportunity for every player in the phone space. The idea behind the Symbian operating system was simple — to create a microkernel and its associated libraries and a separate user interface that would be easy to modify to suit competing visions for what a smartphone can do and how that functionality should look like.
Companies would pay the same licensing fee to use Symbian OS, ensuring no single entity had complete control over the operating system, and they would be allowed to develop proprietary interfaces on top of it.
Developers would have an easy way to tap into the potential of the Symbian platform with greater ease without having to spend too many resources to support phones from different manufacturers — at least in theory. One milestone was Nokia bundle with Concord Eye digital camera. Some journalists used that in sport events since it was the fastest way to get news pictures to the newspapers. In , Nokia launched the third generation Communicator phone also known as the Communicator , running Symbian version 6, building on the foundations of EPOC version 5.
The Communicator hardware was the normal evolution of the series, with a color internal screen with a resolution of by pixels.
When folded, it looked like a normal brick phone with a tiny monochrome screen 80 by 48 pixels and a fold-out antenna. Nokia improved on the design Nokia with subsequent models, starting with the i in which featured 40 MB of internal storage, support for video streaming, and a more reliable, LED-backlit LCD panel. This model was followed by the Nokia which offered a similar set of features in an even smaller and lighter design weighing grams.
Meanwhile, on the mainstream side, Nokia released some of the most iconic feature phone designs in history between and The Nokia was the first phone to offer replaceable faceplates and also among the first to bundle the game Snake.
This phone was succeeded by the Nokia The more compact phone had great battery life, it came in several bright colors and could be easily customized with a myriad of phone covers and classic ringtones, it was able to survive several drops to the pavement, and we can only imagine how many human lifetimes were wasted playing Snake on it. The Nokia that followed it sold an additional million using the same recipe of simplicity and durability, with a friendly design that was meant to appeal more to a general consumer audience as opposed to the bland business-oriented phones of the 90s.
A few of years before that, in , the Nokia was notable for using a slider form factor and because of the design's curvature, it was later nicknamed the "banana phone. Another notable phone released that year was the ultra compact Nokia , when the miniaturization of a phone's footprint was a key selling feature itself.
Also featured in several movies, the could store up to names and came with an infrared port for communicating with a compatible PC or a printer. The Nokia was a popular feature phone for many years to come among users who desired a small phone with a long battery life and the absence of modern wireless connectivity that could be more easily tracked.
In the subsequent years he established a dedicated design center in Los Angeles, California, followed by two more in England and Finland. These were supplanted by several remote teams in Japan, China, Germany, and Denmark. In other words, Nuovo saw an opportunity in using the time between mobile chipset life cycles to get creative about the overall presentation and feel of Nokia phones. At first, this was a source of tension between designers and engineers at Nokia, and it made the phone wider and bulkier at a time when the industry was pushing in the opposite direction with every new design.
However, there were implications of this design choice that were positive — the wider chassis meant the phone could have a wider screen, the shorter body meant it was more pocketable than other phones, and the removable keyboard and back covers led to the blossoming of a new market for Nokia phone accessories.
The Nokia also established the idea that phones could double as entertainment devices to pass the time, thanks in no small part to a simple and addictive game called Snake. This, coupled with the infinitely customizable phone covers made the Nokia stand out and earn a lot of consumer mindshare. It also helped greatly that Nokia was busy staying on top of tech innovations around the GSM standard.
In Europe, people were more reliant on pay-as-you-go mobile plans, which led to a habit of saving money using text messages when a phone call could be avoided. Nokia Mobile Phones knew it had all the right ingredients within its organization to carve itself a path to dominance in the phone industry, and was eager to execute on its vision of what a smartphone should be like, since NMP executives were convinced this would be the next big thing in tech.
The period between and gave way to numerous Nokia phones, where designers and engineers worked together to enable various forms and feature sets that would cater to almost any taste, sometimes going well into the unconventional.
At the same time, NMP was looking into how it could leverage alliances with other organizations to infuse new devices with useful services.
Before long, however, NMP executives realized these efforts were not a sound strategy as many of these alliances were open platforms where competitors would also be able to draw value. They would soon be proven wrong with the arrival of the Nokia , which offered a built-in VGA camera at a time when rivals only offered this feature as an add-on that was cumbersome to use.
The screen was 2. However, a bigger defect was the limited 4 MB of internal storage that was not expandable in any form. It had Bluetooth connectivity, and a sliding keypad design that allowed it to be compact enough to easily fit in your pocket. It was also able to take advantage of Multimedia Messaging MMS , meaning you could send pictures to someone else with the same ease of sending an SMS text message.
But more importantly, the set the standard for how a camera phone should be designed, and paved the way for several bold designs that would propel the company to new financial heights. This new phone had nearly identical specifications but sported a storage expansion slot and traded the sliding keypad design for an unusual, circular keypad. The circular keypad was more of a conversation starter than an efficient way to dial or write SMS messages, and small things like a menu to switch between open applications as well as a feature-rich calendar contributed to a good overall user experience.
It also had a built-in email client, which made it appealing to businesses. Nokia iterated on this design until , but the most popular of the series was the , which was more compact while retaining virtually the same feature set as its predecessors.
In , Nokia launched the N-Gage, a hybrid between a handheld console and a phone designed to appeal to the gaming crowd. This was a time when most people did not typically associate a phone with entertainment, and Nintendo was conquering the hearts of millennial kids with the iconic Game Boy Advance handheld.
It had online multiplayer games, and Nokia actually positioned this device as a competitor to the Game Boy Advance, but it had few very important design flaws. These issues were largely fixed in the N-Gage QD that was introduced in , but by that time the novelty had worn off. Even as retailers started dropping the N-Gage from their stores, Nokia kept pushing it until and published the last game for it in This was a hard lesson for Nokia. This time, however, the phone in question was intended as more of a fashion statement that would last for a short while, only to be quickly replaced by a novel design that would theoretically force consumers to upgrade their phones more frequently.
Battery life was not something to write home about, and despite being offered for free as part of some mobile plans it never managed to become more than a fashion statement for relatively few consumers. Another notable Nokia phone that landed on the market in was the Nokia , a. Sliding the phone upwards revealed a VGA camera on the back, and holding this phone during calls was much easier thanks to its unique shape.
That latter part is important, as Nokia had changed its focus from trying to be the first mover to scaling up its successful mobile phone business as fast as possible.
In other words, Nokia would wait until new hardware components became cheaper to buy in large quantities and flood the market with a variety of designs that were bold on the exterior but had rather boring or slightly outdated internals. In , Nokia scrapped the Club Nokia strategy and told carriers it would no longer develop new multimedia services. In doing so, the company would reignite its partnership with mobile carriers, and even decided to work with them on making custom co-branded phones that would cater to their specific needs.
For one, the US market was mostly consolidated among a few carriers, and they all wanted to sell phones locked to their own networks. Despite these misfires, Nokia continued to focus on new phone form factors in One of the more notable models was the Nokia , a widescreen smartphone and the first Nokia phone to sport a touchscreen. It had a large 3. It opened up just like a clamshell phone, but it also allowed you to rotate the display portion in ways that effectively turned it into a camcorder with a 2-megapixel sensor and dedicated record button.
The camera used Carl Zeiss Tessar lenses, as Nokia believed optics played a greater role in producing quality images than the resolution of the sensor. So why would it need Withings? Why get back into a market where it just got burned? The thing is, the company's Nokia Technology division, which is separate from the Nokia Networking subsidiary, has been dabbling in other markets all along. In , the division announced an Android tablet called the N1, which was only sold in China.
With Withings, Nokia is now branching into personal health technologies, which many believe could be the next big consumer market. But that market hasn't really arrived yet. The "Internet of Things" has been a tough sell so far. And Nokia will face enormous competition, including the very same companies that bested it in the smart phone market.
It's better to think of Withings and the OZO camera along the same lines as Alphabet's "other bets" category: a series of investments in what could be the next big thing, just as electricity and phones once proved to be.
In that sense, Nokia today is what it's always been: a company with an eye on what's next. The most important key figures provide you with a compact summary of the topic of "Nokia" and take you straight to the corresponding statistics.
In the following 5 chapters, you will quickly find the 39 most important statistics relating to "Nokia". Skip to main content Try our corporate solution for free!
Single Accounts Corporate Solutions Universities. Published by Shanhong Liu , Sep 16, As of , Nokia's Networks Business is the most revenue-generating business segment of Nokia. The company has also been involved in cloud computing and mapping applications.
In , Nokia purchased Here, a company that focuses on mapping data, technologies, and services based on cloud computing. In , Nokia purchased a majority stake in French telecommunications equipment company Alcatel-Lucent. Nokia also competes with these firms across several other key technologies including 5G , edge computing , extended reality XR , and smart energy.
This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text. Nokia's net sales. Nokia's business segments Nokia Networks sales. Nokia's standing in the market Nokia's brand value. Nokia's share of service provider network infrastructure market.
0コメント