How awesome was Nokia ? In the most glorious 2000, Nokia's market value reached US$250 billion, second only to , McDonald's and Coca-Cola.
As of 2012, it had a total of 100,000 employees and a business span in 150 countries. It is a truly global enterprise. From 1996 to 2011, Nokia's mobile phone market share has dominated the world for 15 consecutive years.
During the glorious period, Nokia waved his hand and donated 50 million yuan with the Wenchuan earthquake. Apple only donated 500,000 yuan at that time, and Samsung at best donated 34 million yuan. During the Ya'an earthquake, Nokia donated 1 million, Samsung donated 60 million, and Apple donated 50 million.
looks a bit less, but Apple's market value was 366.7 billion at that time, Samsung Electronics 202.5 billion, and Nokia only had 11.5 billion left at that time... After seeing this news, many netizens called for the return to use of Nokia online.
Nokia's employees also have many positive comments on it. Nokia has worked for ten or fifteen years, which is rare in the communications industry where talent flows frequently.
Some time ago, Nokia launched a mobile phone Nokia 5710 XpressAudio with wireless headphones built in body, which attracted a lot of attention. Now Nokia has released another product, this time it is a smartphone.
The story that most people are familiar with is that Nokia is “cold”. With the continuous development of the smartphone industry and the rapid rise of various mobile phone manufacturers in Apple, Samsung and China, Nokia's share in the mobile phone industry has also been quickly squeezed.
However, recently, Nokia has proved that it is still alive, even better than many people imagine.
In 2007, Nokia's 46 million mobile phones were forced to recall on a large scale worldwide due to battery defects. Apple launches its first iPhone .
In 2008, Nokia's third-quarter financial report showed that profits fell by 30%, and smartphone sales fell by 3.1%. In 2009, Nokia made its first loss in 10 years. This is a precursor to Nokia's decline.
By 2010, Symbian was no longer adapting to the development of the smartphone era. Except for Apple, almost all mobile phone manufacturers have turned to the Android platform.
Nokia chose to cooperate with Intel to do Meego from scratch, and then gave up. All previous investments were wasted.
This Finnish giant company now comes from some hidden components in the mobile Internet field.
These components allow people to access any information from anywhere in the world, such as: routers, network processor , base station radio access units and other high-tech components. In 2018, Nokia fell to No. 466 in the world ranking with annual revenue of 23 billion euros.
The transformation from a mobile phone industry giant to a hidden component supplier has caused losses to Nokia. After nine years of shrinking the company's scale, the company was forced to give up its mobile phone business, lay off thousands of employees, and caused millions of economic losses.
In 2013, Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft for $7.3 billion, which is only one-sixteenth of its former highest market value of $115.1 billion, which is a "sold at a low price".
Since Nokia sold its half-dead mobile phone business to Microsoft , it has felt like it is going down. Also in 2013, Nokia sold its headquarters building. It gives people the feeling that Nokia is almost closing.
After "marrying into Microsoft", Nokia finally suffered the fate of being dismembered. On July 17, 2014, Microsoft announced a layoff plan that affected 18,000 people, of which 70% of the former Nokia employees were.
Nokia China currently has Beijing R&D center and procurement, supply chain management and other departments, with nearly 3,000 employees in total, of which 90% will be laid off.
An era has come to an end, and the era of mobile smartphones has begun. Smartphone manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi , Huawei , etc. have all appeared, showing their skills.
At the end of 2016, the Nokia mobile phone brand was exclusively licensed to HMD. The new Nokia phones we see now are actually not written by Nokia.After Nokia withdrew from the mobile phone market, the company began to fade out of people's vision.
Although Nokia gradually faded out of the mobile phone market, it is little known that Nokia's income is still worthwhile, not as embarrassing as people imagine.
The company's financial report of the world's four major communication equipment manufacturers in 2018 showed that Huawei's revenue was US$105.2 billion, Nokia (Nokiah) revenue was US$25.4 billion, ranking second, followed by Ericsson , which received US$22.7 billion in annual revenue and ZTE , which ranked fourth with US$12.7 billion.
In the first quarter of 2022, Xiaomi's total revenue was RMB 73.4 billion, which is far higher than Nokia, but in terms of profits, Xiaomi only has RMB 2.9 billion, about three-fifths of Nokia's.
How does Nokia make a lot of money in silence?
Now Nokia has three major business segments. Among them, telecom equipment supply is Nokia's main source of revenue, accounting for about 80% of all Nokia's revenue.
For example, in the whole year of 2021, Nokia earned about RMB 123.7 billion in sales in telecom equipment. In terms of market share, Nokia has also achieved a global leading position, almost comparable to Ericsson.
In fact, in the early years, communication device was just Nokia's "side business" and has only become the "main business" in recent years. Another position that Nokia has long been visionary and persistent in - communication equipment (especially 5G technology innovation) and solutions (B2B), has given the company a second growth curve, giving it the opportunity to turn the tables against the wind.
Although it failed in the market melee of smartphones and did not keep up with the trend, Nokia did not lag behind in communication equipment.
noticed the huge potential of the 5G communication equipment market very early on. In 2006, Nokia cooperated with Siemens to form Nokia Siemens Networks, each holding 50% of the shares. In 2010, the company announced its full acquisition of Motorola Communications Corporation (Motorola) and its global business.
In July 2013, buy back the other half of the shares held by Siemens, acquire all control of Nokia Siemens Communications, and strengthen its layout in the field of telecommunications equipment.
In 2015, it announced the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent Communications, a global mainstream communications equipment manufacturer, for US$16.6 billion, and sold its non-main business Here map for 2.8 billion euros in the same year.
In 2016, Nokia became the second largest communications equipment manufacturer in the world after Huawei. In hindsight, this series of mergers and acquisitions and sale strategies are undoubtedly a very correct decision.
Nokia has built network infrastructure into a core business of the company, completed industrial integration, and improved it from a supplier who simply provides mobile networks to a company that can provide complete network infrastructure (including IP routers and fiber network).
Now, Nokia, Ericsson and Huawei have formed a situation where the world is divided into three parts in the communication equipment industry.
There is also a business that provides a large amount of revenue to Nokia every year, which is Nokia's patent licensing.
After Nokia sold its mobile phone business, network equipment and patent licensing became its main source of revenue. According to a Nokia executive, Nokia has about 30,000 patents and 10,000 patent portfolios. Even the App Store was first invented by Nokia.
Nokia and a Finnish company called HMD have reached an authorization agreement. The other party will design and sell Nokia-branded smartphones and tablets. Nokia will charge trademark license fees and patent license fees based on product sales.
Don’t underestimate these trademark licensing fees and patent licensing fees. Although these are "old capital", they really make Nokia profitable. Other smartphones have become popular because of this and have been sued for many lawsuits.
Even if many mobile phone manufacturers do not have in-depth mobile phone manufacturing cooperation with Nokia on the surface, they still need to pay Nokia a considerable fee.
According to the standards officially announced by Nokia in 2018, each mobile phone that uses Nokia 5G patented must be paid separately to Nokia for about RMB 20.
Samsung, Apple and HTC before were all Nokia's "devil under the knife". Nokia sued Apple in 2011, which has record-breaking results, and Apple finally lost about 3 billion yuan. What's more important is that since then, Apple has to pay patent fees to Nokia every quarter, otherwise it would be impossible for Apple to produce iPhones.
In 2016, Nokia announced that it had filed 4 patent infringement lawsuits against Huawei, pointing to 3 patent infringement of Huawei.
In 2019, Nokia initiated a global patent lawsuit against Lenovo . Later, the two parties reached a settlement, and Lenovo and Nokia signed a license agreement and paid a license fee to Nokia.
It was also in 2019 that Nokia and Daimler also broke out in patent war, and many suppliers were involved. In 2021, Nokia launched a patent infringement lawsuit against OPPO in many countries including the United Kingdom, France, India.
Until February this year, relevant reports showed that Nokia was still in patent disputes with Toyota , Honda and Nissan , and also criticized American technology companies such as Apple for enjoying the huge value brought by cellular communication standard technology but were unwilling to pay reasonable fees.
It seems that life is precious and side jobs are even more expensive. It’s no wonder that young people nowadays have a side job, and even if the company doesn’t have a side job, they may go into a poor alley. The second growth curve is very important to both companies and individuals. The main business seeks survival and the side business seeks development.
Author: Fengzhong
