History about Nokia

Nokia’s history dates back to 1865, when mining engineer Fredrik Idestam set up his first wood pulp mill at the Tammerkoski Rapids in Southwestern Finland. Few years after that Fredrik opened a second mill on the banks of the Nokianvirta river, inspiring him to name his company Nokia Ab in 1871.

Fredrik Idestam

Nokia Company has a long history of successful change and innovation, adapting to shifts in markets and technologies. From its humble beginning with one paper mill, the company has participated in many sectors over time: cables, paper products, tires, rubber boots, consumer and industrial electronics, plastics, chemicals, telecommunications infrastructure and more. Most recently, Nokia has been best known for its revolutionary wireless communication technologies, which have connected billions of people through networks and mobile phones.

Leo Mechelin

 Nokia was originally founded as a paper manufacturer by Fredrik Idestam in year 1865. After having established a groundwood pulp mill in South-western Finland, Idestam in 1868 constructed a second mill in the nearby town of Nokia: having better resources for the generation of  hydro power production.

In 1971 Ideastam along with close friend Leo Mechelin transformed the firm into a share company, thereby founding the Nokia Company.

In 1967, we took our current form as Nokia Corporation as a result of the merger of Idestam’s Nokia AB, Finnish Rubber Works, a manufacturer of rubber boots, tires and other rubber products founded in 1898, and Finnish Cable Works Ltd, a manufacturer of telephone and power cables founded in 1912. The new Nokia Corporation had five businesses: rubber, cable, forestry, electronics and power generation.

Nokia first entered the telecommunications equipment market in 1960 when an electronics department was established at Finnish Cable Works to concentrate on the production of radio-transmission equipment. Regulatory and technological reforms have played a role in our success. Deregulation of the European telecommunications industries since the late 1980s has stimulated competition and boosted customer demand.

In 1982, we introduced the first fully-digital local telephone exchange in Europe, and, in the same year, the world’s first car phone for the Nordic Mobile Telephone analog standard. The technological breakthrough of GSM, which made more efficient use of frequencies and had greater capacity in addition to high-quality sound, was followed by the European resolution in 1987 to adopt GSM as the European digital standard by July 1, 1991. The first GSM call was made with a Nokia phone over the Nokia-built network of a Finnish operator called Radiolinja in 1991, and in the same year Nokia won contracts to supply GSM networks in other European countries.

By 1998 Nokia established itself as the world leader in mobile phones sales. Between 1996 and 2001 Nokia’s turnover increased by almost 500 percent from €6.5bn to €31bn. The exploding world-wide demand for mobile phones through the 90s caused a major logistics crisis for many mobile phone operators; however Nokia was, and still is today, renowned as being the best operator for handling such logistics.

Nokia was to sell its billionth phone in 2005 as mobile phone subscriptions surpassed 2bn in this same period. In 2007 Nokia was internationally recognized as the fifth most valued brand in the world. In both 2009 and 2010 the Dow Jones Indexes ranked Nokia as the worlds most sustainable technology company as they set about developing their business methods and strategies in accordance with new environmental standards.

 In October 2009 Nokia posted its first quarterly loss in more than a decade, largely thought to be a repercussion of HTC releasing the first phone to use Google’s Android operating system: the HTC Dream (as of today 60 percent of mobile phones are powered by Android). After a year of struggling to keep pace with iPhone and Android devices Nokia hired former Microsoft executive Stephen Elop as chief executive in September 2009.

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