Timeline: The fall of Nokia

The mobile world has changed rapidly in the last couple of years. While some mobile players pioneered these changes, others were quite slow and couldn’t adapt to the lightening-fast changes. Earlier this year, there were reports from HIS iSuppli how Nokia’s 14-year run as the biggest phone manufacturer finally comes to an end. Most of us have loved our Nokia devices and it brings in a lot of nostalgia to many users, but that’s the problem. The company introduced us to the term smartphone in 2002. Just five years later, the iPhone was launched, changing everything one may demand from a smartphone, but Nokia failed to see the changing consumer demand. Though Nokia builds quality hardware for phones, it moved too slowly to catch up with its competitors in terms of OS and app ecosystem. In mere 2-3 years, Google and Apple have managed to shake Nokia off its position to run a two horsed mobile race. While the question on everyone’s mind was whether Nokia will ditch Symbian for Android, the company surprised everyone by joining hands with Microsoft’s Windows Phone. After a lukewarn response for the Lumia series last year, followed by dipping shares and hundreds of lay offs, Nokia’s future still doesn’t seem stable. Here’s a timeline showing the fall of this once-mighty company. Nokia before the telecommunication eraNokia’s identity is more than a century old, which goes back to 1856 while we were still ruled by the Britishers. It was founded by Fredrik Idestam as a paper manufacturing company. In 1871, Idestam along with Leo Mechelin transformed it into a share company and also renamed it as Nokia Company, as we know of it today. In 1902, Mechilin further expanded it into electricity business. However, it was years later in 1967 that Nokia came across as a true global corporation after Nokia Company merged with Finnish Cable Works and Finnish Rubber Works. This new company as a whole had its foot in several market segments from paper products, car and bicycle tyres, footwear, communication cables, televisions and other consumer electronics, personal computers, electricity generation machinery, and more. But in the 90s, the company divested itself of all its non-telecommunication business to focus on the telecommunication market. 1967 to 2000It was during the 60s that Nokia gave markets a taste of its electronics division and developed its first electronic device in 1962. Till we reached the 70s, it had deepened its roots into telecommunication. In 70s and 80s, it developed digital switch for telephone exchanges and a digital, portable and encrypted text-based communications device. Nokia had its stint with producing communication technology for the military till then and by the beginning of the 80s, it began developing mobile phones. In 1988, the company turned into Nokia mobile phones. The company launched its first GSM phone dubbed 1101 in 1992 and followed it by Nokia 2100 in 1994. It was the Nokia 2100 that showed the famous Nokia tune. GSM brought along high-quality (as per the standards then) voice calls, international roaming, support for text message services (SMS). Needless to say, it was the beginning of the mobile boom. In fact, with the growing popularity of GSM, Nokia became the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world in 1998.

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