Nokia

Nokia is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology and consumer electronics corporation whose origins date to 1865, when mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established a pulp mill on the shores of the Tammerkoski rapids near Tampere, then part of the Russian Empire. A second mill opened in 1868 near the small town of Nokia, which gave the company its name. Over the following decades the group grew to include the Finnish Rubber Works and Kaapelitehdas (the Cable Factory), and in 1967 the three companies merged into the modern Nokia Corporation, operating in forestry, cables, rubber and electronics. Nokia's path to mobile phones began in 1979, when it founded the mobile radio manufacturer Mobira, which launched the world's first international cellular service (NMT) in 1981 and the first commercially available GSM phone, the Nokia 1011, in 1992. Under CEO Jorma Ollila, who took over in 1992, Nokia refocused on telecommunications and became the best-selling mobile phone brand in the world, overtaking Motorola in 1998. Iconic handsets such as the 5110, 3210, 3310, 8210 and the N-series (N95, N8, 808 PureView) made Nokia a household name, with the preloaded game Snake becoming one of the most famous mobile games of all time. The brand also spawned the luxury Vertu line and, at its peak in 2007-2008, held more than 40% of the global handset market. The smartphone era proved fatal to Nokia's handset business. In 2011, new CEO Stephen Elop abandoned Symbian and MeeGo in favour of a strategic partnership with Microsoft and Windows Phone, and the company's market share collapsed as Android and iOS took over. After years of losses, Nokia sold its mobile and devices division to Microsoft in April 2014 for $7.2 billion. Since then, Nokia has reinvented itself as a leading supplier of 4G and 5G network infrastructure. It bought out Siemens' stake in the Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture in 2013 and in 2016 completed the $16.6 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, inheriting Bell Labs and becoming one of the two dominant players in telecom network equipment alongside Ericsson. It has won major 5G deployments worldwide, including a NASA contract (via Bell Labs) to build a 4G LTE network for astronauts on the Moon. The Nokia phone name lives on through a licensing deal: in 2016, HMD Global - founded by former Nokia executive Jean-Francois Baril - acquired the rights to manufacture Nokia-branded feature phones and Android smartphones, re-releasing classics like the 3310 and launching the Nokia 6 and subsequent Android One devices. Nokia itself also licenses the brand to other makers for TVs, laptops and home appliances. With headquarters in Espoo, roughly 80,000 employees and operations in more than 130 countries, Nokia today is one of the world's largest technology companies, though most consumers still associate the name with the phones that defined an era.