Translated from the original Spanish article. Read in Spanish
The brand of the "indestructible" phone… started out making paper. Long before the famous Snake game, Nokia was grinding wood next to a river in Finland.
A mill by the rapids
Finland, 1865. The engineer Fredrik Idestam opens a mill by some rapids in the southwest of the country. There he grinds wood to make paper pulp.
Three years later he opens another mill in a town called Nokia, on the banks of the river of the same name… and that's where the company's name comes from.
Boots, cables and tires
Over time, the company joins forces with two neighboring factories: one making rubber boots and another making cables. In 1967 the three merge and the modern Nokia is born.
For years, Nokia made everything: paper, boots, tires and cables. It was a large Finnish company, but almost nobody outside the country knew it.
Before mobile phones, Nokia made paper, rubber boots, tires and cables.
The first mobile phones
The road to mobile phones began in 1979, when Nokia set up a joint venture called Mobira with the TV maker Salora. It made phones for the new Nordic mobile network, which went live in 1981.
Those first phones were huge. The Mobira Senator, a 1982 car phone, weighed 9.8 kilos. Five years later, in 1987, came the Mobira Cityman, which fit in your hand and weighed about 800 grams with its battery.
The Cityman became famous because of a photo: Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was pictured using one in Helsinki. Since then, many in Finland called it "the Gorba".
The big bet
In 1992, Jorma Ollila became the company's chief executive. And Nokia did something very bold: it bet everything on mobile phones and gradually left its other businesses behind.
It paid off. In the 1990s and 2000s, Nokia became the most popular phone brand on the planet. Its phones were famous for surviving drops and for batteries that lasted for days. Its best-selling model passed two hundred and fifty million units.
The 1982 Mobira Senator weighed 9.8 kilos; the 1987 Cityman, about 800 grams.
Nokia's lesson
Nokia's story is that of a company that knew how to change businesses several times. It went from paper to rubber, from rubber to cables and from cables to phones.
From paper… to millions of pockets.
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Sources (in Spanish)
- Historia de la empresa: Wikipedia, Nokia, y Wikipedia, «History of Nokia».
- El fundador: Wikipedia, Fredrik Idestam.
- Mobira, el Senator, el Cityman y Jorma Ollila: Wikipedia, History of Nokia, y Slidebean.
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