Nokia Corporation (OMX: NOK1V, NYSE: NOK, FWB: NOA3) is a Multi-national communications Corporation, focused on the key growth areas of wired and wireless telecommunications. Nokia is currently the world's largest manufacturer of mobile telephones, with a global device market share of approximately 38% in Q2 of 2007.[2] Nokia produces mobile phones for every major market segment and protocol, including GSM, CDMA, and W-CDMA (UMTS). 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.

Nokia's headquarters are located in Espoo, a neighbouring city of Finland's capital Helsinki. It has R&D, manufacturing, and sales representation sites in many continents throughout the world. Nokia Research Center, the corporation's industrial research laboratories, has sites in Helsinki; Tampere; Toijala; Tokyo; Beijing; Budapest; Bochum; Palo Alto, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Major production factories are located at Salo, Finland; Beijing, China; Dongguan, China; Chennai, India; Komárom, Hungary and the Ruhr region at Germany. In March 2007, Nokia signed a memorandum with Cluj-Napoca City Council, Romania to open a new plant near the city in Jucu commune. Nokia's Design Departure has stayed at Salo.

Nokia plays a very large role in the economy of Finland. Nokia is by far the largest Finnish company, accounting for about a third of the market capitalization of the Helsinki Stock Exchange (OMX Helsinki); a unique situation for an industrialized country.[6] It is an important employer in Finland and several small companies have grown into large ones as Nokia's subcontractors. Nokia increased Finland's GDP by more than 1.5 percent in 1999 alone. In 2004 Nokia's share of the Finland's GDP was 3.5 percent and accounted for almost a quarter of Finland's exports in 2003. In 2006, Nokia generated revenue that for the first time exceeded the state budget of Finland. This has led some to refer to Finland as "Nokialand."

Finns have ranked Nokia many times as the best Finnish brand and employer. Nokia is listed as the 5th most valuable global brand in BusinessWeek's Best Global Brands list of 2007 (1st non-US company), the 20th most admirable company worldwide in Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies list of 2007 (1st in network communications, 4th non-US company),[8] and is the world's 119th largest company in Fortune Global 500 list of 2007, up from 131 of the previous year.

History

What is known today as Nokia (pronounced /nok-iɑ/ in IPA) was established in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill by Knut Fredrik Idestam on the banks of the Tammerkoski rapids in the town of Tampere, in south-western Finland. The company was later relocated to Nokia by the Nokianvirta river, which had better resources for hydropower production. That's where the company also got its name that is still used today. The name of the town of Nokia originated from the river which flowed through the town. The river itself, Nokianvirta, was named after the old Finnish word originally meaning a dark, furry animal that was locally known as the nokia, or sable, later pine marten.

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, capacitors, aluminum, etc.

Telecommunications era

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.

Since 1964 had developed VHF-radio simultaneously with Salora Oy, which later in 1971 also developed the ARP-phone. In 1979 the merger of these two companies resulted in the establishment of Mobira Oy and three years later it launched the NMT phone. Nokia bought Salora Oy in 1984 and now owning 100% of the company, changed the company's name to Nokia-Mobira Oy. In 1988 Jorma Nieminen and others started a spin-off company; Benefon Oy. One year later, Nokia Mobira Oy became Nokia Mobile Phones and in 1991 the first GSM phone was launched.

In the 1970s, Nokia became more involved in the telecommunications industry by developing the Nokia DX200, a digital switch for telephone exchanges. In 1982, a DX200 switch became the world's first digital telephone switch to be put into operational use. The DX200 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 equipment production was separated into Telefenno, a company jointly owned by the parent corporation and by a company owned by the Finnish state. In 1987 the state sold its shares to Nokia and in 1992 the name was changed to Nokia Telecommunications.

In the 1970s and 1980s Nokia developed the Sanomalaitejärjestelmä ("Message device system") for Finnish Defence Forces. [10]

In the 1980s, Nokia produced a series of personal computers called MikroMikko.[11] 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 Computers, which shut down its only factory in Finland (in the town of Espoo, where computers had been produced since the 1960s) at the end of March 2000[12], thus ending large-scale PC manufacturing in the country.

First mobile phones


Nokia had been producing commercial and military mobile radio communications technology since the 1960s and later began developing mobile phones for the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) network standard that went online in the 1980s.

In 1982, Nokia (then Mobira) introduced its first car phone, the Mobira Senator for NMT 450 networks. The Mobira Talkman, launched in 1984, was the world's first transportable phone. In 1987, Nokia introduced the world's first handheld phone, the Mobira Cityman 900. When the Mobira Senator of 1982 had weighed 9.8 kg (21.6 lb), and the Talkman just under 5 kg (11 lb), the Mobira Cityman weighed only 800 g (28 oz) with the battery and had a price tag of 24,000 Finnish marks (approximately EUR 4,560).[13] Despite the high price, the first phones were almost snatched from the sales assistants’ hands. Initially, the mobile phone was a ‘yuppie’ product and a status symbol.

NMT 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 in the world, 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, by then Prime Minister of Finland Harri Holkeri, using a Nokia phone.

In the 1980s, during the era of its CEO Kari Kairamo, Nokia expanded 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 divisions, 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-telecommunications 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.