On the face of it the small Finnish town of Nokia looks
wholly unremarkable. A few squat blocks of flats are
nestled in the winter snow, and along the heavily gritted
main road is a small strip of shops, restaurants and a
discount supermarket.
There's little sign that this quiet backwater once gave its
name to the company that revolutionised the mobile phone
industry in the late 1990s and helped turn Finland's
economy into one of the most prosperous in the world.
At its peak in the early 2000s Nokia supplied 40% of the
world's mobile phones, creating Finland's first globally
recognised consumer brand.
At home its impact was even greater. According to the
Research Institute of the Finnish Economy it contributed a
quarter of Finland's growth between 1998 and 2007 - a
period Finnish finance minister Alexander Stubb calls an
"economic miracle".
But as quickly as it emerged, Nokia's dominance of the
mobile phone market came crashing down, hitting
Finland's economy hard and coinciding with the longest
recession in the country's history.
"Nokia was huge in Finland by all indicators, and when that
was scaled down we were horrified about the possible
consequences," says Kari Kankaala, director of economic
and urban development for the city of Tampere.
'Backbone of everything'
Tampere is about 15 minutes down the road from the town
of Nokia, and the site of the company's biggest research
and development site, at its peak employing 4,000 high-
tech, skilled workers.
The city's old redbrick smokestacks tell the story of its
19th Century industrial past, but the rise and fall of Nokia's
mobile phone business has dominated its more recent
history.
"It was the backbone of everything here," says Mr
Kankaala. "The universities relied on collaboration with
Nokia, the subcontractors depended on Nokia, the kids
relied on being employed by Nokia.
"Now we have an horrendous unemployment situation of
the order of 14-15%."
Other high-tech firms have since moved in to fill the void.
And Nokia's separate networks business, focusing on
telecoms infrastructure, remains a successful Finnish
enterprise. But a wider economic malaise in Finland
means fewer people are hiring now.
In Tampere former Nokia employees still ponder how the
company went from world leader in mobile phones as
recently as 2007 to the struggling takeover target for
Microsoft in 2014.
"I think one of the high points was when we'd shrunk the
mobile phones smaller than Motorola," says Mika
Grundstrom, a former senior manager at Nokia's R&D site
in Tampere. "That was around 1997-1998. It was kind of
an engineering dream."
For Mika the brief in the early days was simple - make the
phone with the best battery life in the smallest case
possible.
But then all that changed with the rise of the smartphone,
and in particular the launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007.
"Things became much more complex. We were not so sure
anymore what we should actually target. Is it ease of use,
is it battery life, is it size?" he says.
"If you think about the battery life - we had devices that
could last for a week. Then you have this new device, it's
excellent but you need to charge it every day. Ok so how
do you actually sell that to the customer?"
Nokia played catch-up in the smartphone market until
2014, when its mobile phone business was sold to
Microsoft and the Nokia name was removed from its
devices all together.
But despite its effective demise, many Finns say there is a
positive legacy to appreciate.
"Giving Nokia shares to workers made it accepted that
your next door neighbour could be a millionaire," says Kari
Kankaala. He says Nokia's biggest impact was to
revolutionise Finland's business culture.
"That acceptance that someone can actually make money,
combined with the new approach to entrepreneurship -
that was a major change."
Two hours to the south in Helsinki there are already signs
of that new business culture taking hold in the post-Nokia
world.
Tuomas Kytomaa is a software engineer who spent most
of his career working for Nokia, including stints in the US
and Germany.
Last year he returned to Finland to work for the online
retailer Zalando and set up a tech hub on the site of an old
cable factory in the Finnish capital, now converted into
trendy office space.
For him Nokia's legacy is a wealth of talent and expertise
waiting to be tapped.
"The talent hasn't really gone anywhere," he says. "The
sheer magnitude of Nokia in Finland means that there's a
pool of tech talent that has deep specialised knowledge."
"Finland's buzzing with high-tech skills and start-ups."
Whatever the future of Finland's tech industry, few believe
that a company of Nokia's size and influence will appear
again.
"When Nokia was a dominant player in this business, there
were a lot of good things that happened in Finland," says
Seppo Haataja, another former manager at Nokia's
research and development site.
"Now the situation is changing. the innovations are not
coming through the big companies - it's small companies,
the start ups."
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