Nokia once sold 2 in 5 phones on Earth, then lost it all in 7 years
Nokia transformed from a diverse industrial conglomerate into the world's dominant mobile phone manufacturer during the 1990s, capturing nearly 40% of the global market by 2007. However, the company's failure to adapt to shifting market demands and internal management issues led to a rapid decline, culminating in the sale of its handset business to Microsoft in 2014.
Why it matters
The rise and fall of Nokia serves as a classic business case study on the dangers of corporate complacency and the critical importance of listening to internal innovation during periods of technological disruption.
130 countries and a name that everyone remembered, that's how successful Nokia once was. The Finnish company that spent its first century making rubber boots, toilet paper, cables and gas masks reinvented itself in the 1990s as the world's dominant mobile phone maker, controlling roughly a third of global handset sales by 2000. But within the next seven years, it lost almost all of it. The collapse was not about the missing iPhone, but a lesson in what happens when a company stops listening to its own engineers.At its height, Nokia sold more than 400 million phones annually. Its share in global handset sales peaked near 40% around 2007.
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