Nokia
Nokia's history dates back to 1865, when the Finnish mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established a wood-pulp mill in Southern Finland and began manufacturing paper - the original communications medium. Then came technology with the founding of the Finnish Rubber Works at the turn of the 19th century. Rubber, and associated chemicals, were leading edge technologies at the time. Another major technological change was the expansion of electricity into homes and factories which led to the establishment of the Finnish Cable Works in 1912 and, quite naturally, to the manufacture of cables for the telegraph industry and to support that new-fangled device - the telephone!
After operating for 50 years, an Electronics Department was set up at the Cable Works in 1960 and this paved the way for a new era in telecommunications. Nokia Corporation was formed in 1967 by the merger of Nokia Company - the original paper-making business - with the Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works. Design has always been important at Nokia and today's mobile phones are regarded as a benchmark for others to follow. Take, for example, multi-coloured, clip-on facias which turned mobiles into a fashion item overnight. But Nokia has always thought like that and back in the fashion-conscious 1960's when one branch of the corporation was a major rubber manufacturer, it hit on the idea of making brightly-coloured rubber boots at a time when boots followed the Henry Ford principle - you could have any colour, so long as it was black! The '60s, however, were more important as the start of Nokia's entry into the telecommunications market. A radio telephone was developed in 1963 followed, in 1965, by data modems - long before such items were even heard of by the general public. In the 1980's, everyone looked to micro computers as the next 'big thing' and Nokia was no exception as a major producer of computers, monitors and TV sets. In those days, the prospect of High Definition TV, satellite connections and teletext services fuelled the imagination of the fashion conscious homeowner. In the background, however, changes were afoot. The world's first international cellular mobile telephone network, NMT, was introduced in Scandinavia in 1981 and Nokia made the first car phones for it.
True enough, there were 'transportable' mobile phones at the start of the '80's but they were heavy and huge. Nokia produced the original handportable in '87 and phones have continued to shrink in inverse proportion to the growth of the market ever since. It took a technological breakthrough and a change in the political climate to create the wire-free world people are increasingly demanding today. The technology was the digital standard, GSM, which could carry data in addition to high quality voice. In 1987, the political goal was set to adopt GSM throughout Europe on July 1st 1991. Finland met the deadline, thanks to Nokia and the operators.
Politics and technology have continued to shape the industry. The '80s and '90s saw widespread deregulation which stimulated competition and customer expectations. Nokia changed too and in 1992 Jorma Ollila, then President of Nokia Mobile Phones, was appointed to head the entire Nokia Group. The corporation divested the non-core operations and focused on telecommunications in the Digital Age. Few people in the early '90s would have thought that 'going digital' would change things so much. The first GSM text message, sent in 1993 by engineering student Riku Pihkonen, did not appear to represent a pivotal change. But today, text messages are far more popular than making calls and data far exceeds voice by volume. Riku's actual message was unmemorable - hardly on the lines of 'One small step for Man' when the first astronaut landed on the Moon. But it proved that teleworking was possible and that a mobile phone connected to a computer could be used for reading e-mail and transferring files. The rest is history!
Nokia is harnessing its experience in mobility and networks to generate a startling vision of the future. Meeting rooms, offices and homes will be 'smart' enough to recognise their human visitors and give them whatever they want by listening to their requests. Nokia welcomes change and improvement and can embrace new ideas at great speed. Such characteristics will never change but, as to the rest, the story has only just begun! (Nokia, 2001)
