History of Nokia
“Through hardships to the stars” — an unbelievable story of a world-famous brand.
Finland has quite many interventions, that’s why it was a bit hard for me to choose exactly one of them from the list and tell particularly about it in my text.
First, I should say that Finland has won five Nobel prizes totally in such areas as chemistry, literature, peace, psychology, and economics.
Finland has many practical inventions as well that are nowadays widely used all around the globe. I can give you a few examples — Nokia with its messaging software, xylitol, beat recorder, and an activity tracker called Polar, pulled oats, Linux, and Molotov’s cocktail — all these things were created by Finns in Finland.
However, in this text, I decided to concentrate on Nokia and tell a bit more about it, because it is the most well-known Finnish company all around the world. Nokia was founded as a company by Fredrik Idestam back in 1865 and it was named after a small town in the western part of Finland, the name was chosen to be as Finnish as possible to differentiate the new Finnish company from other Russian companies. Back then they did very different products than we see Nokia doing nowadays. Nokia was a gum factory and they produced such things as gumboots and other gum products. However, it was a long time from Nokia as a gum-making company to a high-tech phone company and a time when the famous Nokia cell phones were invented.
Everything started to change in 1964 when Nokia created and started producing their very first radio VHF-cell-phones. Soon after that, they invented also a second model of the cell phone that was called “Autoradiopuhelin” which means “car radiophone”. The technology was just zero generation, but it was successfully launched in 1971 and became the first well-known and widely used. In 1986 phones had more than 35000 users all around the globe, but soon after that, they were replaced by younger generation phones. Although everything went quite well, Nokia was almost sold to Sweden, when its leader Kari Kairamo committed suicide. They tried to sell Nokia to Swedish company Ericsson, but they didn’t want to buy it, because it was not so popular yet. That’s why the company had to search for another leader, that person was Jorma Ollila who made huge changes in the politics of the company and decided to concentrate just on mobile cell phones and that has led the company to its fame.
In 1988 a company called Benefon was founded, it was the first GSM technology cell phone making company. New technology made cell phones more user-friendly and improved the design.
Nokia’s rise and fame in the 1900s was adorable — they managed to become widely used and well-known all over the world.
Nokia’s cell-phones production had a huge effort on the whole economics of the country because all the phones were made in Finland. At that time the company was a leading Finnish product developer, as approximately 30% of the Finnish private sector R&D employees were employed by Nokia. The company‘s position was good for many years in a row and the situation was the same even in the beginning of 2007, but after that, when in the same year iPhone and Android phones appeared, Nokia became a sub-responded company and since then it has lost its domination. In February 2011 the company was even sold to Microsoft. In cooperation with Microsoft Nokia tried its last attempt in this area creating Lumia smartphones. Phones were user-friendly and had good design as well. However, these phones have never reached popularity and were blamed by iPhone and Android smartphones.
That has left the company no choice but to concentrate more on other electronic devices, such as 360-degree cameras or digital maps, they did that until 2016. In June 2016 things started to change a bit and Nokia demonstrated its first 5G-ready network. New Nokia smartphones were more popular than the Lumia ones, although they won’t be ever able to overcome the success of iPhones or Android smartphones.
Nowadays many different brands collaborate with Nokia and Nokia has become a public joint-stock company in Finland. Nokia’s headquarters are based in Espoo, Finland. The official business language of Nokia is English. Nokia has played a vital role in the history and economy of Finland and it is still an important employer in the country.
