The first news of the end appeared a year ago, when HMD began selling smartphones under its brand. And this year, HMD was enough to establish its logo and be able to cut off Nokia. Nokia smartphones are marked as discontinued on the website. The last Nokia model is the XR21 (or C210), which didn’t even make it to us for sale. The Nokia brand will remain only on the basic push-button dumb phones, with the HMD logo on the smartphones instead.
It hasn’t been about the original Nokia for years anyway, which has long been engaged in another business and building telecommunications networks. Nokia Corporation, as a manufacturer of network equipment for mobile technology, is actually still Finnish, but the largest shareholder is the American BlackRock group.
Nokia caught the smartphone trend late and was dealt another blow by Microsoft, who bought the mobile business and then messed everything they could with Lumia phones (even though they were interesting phones in terms of hardware). Since 2016, the Nokia brand for mobile phones has been licensed by HMD Global, but they have not made a significant impact on the market. In order to call the current step the end of an era, we still have to wait until (if) even push-button phones disappear, but the end of Nokia probably already came with the advent of the first iPhones.
The Nokia story
Nokia was an incredibly resilient company that managed to survive in various forms for 150 years. Its story began in 1865, when Fredrik Idestam and Leo Mechelin founded a wood pulp mill by the Tammerkoski River in Tampere, Finland, where they focused on paper production. After the success of their first mill, they built another one on the Nokianvirta river near the town of Nokia, which also inspired the name of the new company – Nokia Aktiebolag.
Later, Gustaf Fogelholm, Idestam’s son-in-law, took over the management of the company, who from 1896 expanded the business to other areas as well. In 1903, the first power plant was built, and ten years later, the second. Meanwhile, Suomen Gummitehdas was founded near Nokia in 1896, producing wellies and other rubber products. In 1912, the company Suomen Kaapelitehdas was added, which specialized in the production of electric, telephone and telegraph cables. These companies worked closely together.
After World War I, Suomen Kaapelitehdas experienced financial difficulties as demand was more focused on footwear than cables. In 1922, it fell under the management of the rubber company Suomen Gummitehdas. In 1967, the Nokia conglomerate was founded, which merged paper mills, energy, rubber production and cables and gradually expanded its activities to include other electronic products. This gave birth to Nokia as we know it – a company that conquered the telecommunications market, whether in the field of mobile phones or infrastructure.
The success of the telecommunications division led Nokia to gradually abandon the production of rubber and paper, and its main business became mobile technology. For 14 years, Nokia was the largest producer of mobile phones and for a long time it was also the leader in the smartphone segment. However, with the arrival of the iPhone and competition from Asia, which was able to imitate Apple in many ways, it began to lose positions. It became unprofitable to make phones, which resulted in the sale of the mobile division to Microsoft.
Which Nokia was your favorite?
Source: www.cnews.cz
