Finnish 5G gear maker Nokia Oyj has redesigned its brand to cease folks from associating it with cellphones — a enterprise it left nearly a decade in the past.
The model revamp, introduced on Sunday, comes alongside a set of recent strategic pillars meant to allow sooner progress because the world more and more adopts fifth-generation cell applied sciences.
“In most individuals’s minds, we’re nonetheless a profitable cell phone model, however this isn’t what Nokia is about,” Chief Government Workplace Pekka Lundmark mentioned in an interview forward of the Cell World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday. “We wish to launch a brand new model that’s focusing very a lot on the networks and industrial digitalization, which is a totally completely different factor from the legacy cellphones.”
Nokia-branded telephones are nonetheless offered by HMD Global Oy. HMD received the license after Microsoft Corp., which purchased the enterprise in 2014, stopped utilizing the identify.
Lundmark additionally mentioned that Nokia will concentrate on including market share within the firm’s enterprise serving wi-fi service suppliers with community gear. Nokia now has “the ammunition and the instruments” to take market share with out sacrificing margins, he mentioned. That’s been helped by restrictions on Chinese language rival, Huawei Applied sciences Co., after numerous European governments blocked the corporate from promoting components for 5G networks.
Nokia additionally needs to ramp up progress in its enterprise promoting non-public 5G networks to corporations. The enterprise enterprise reached an 8% share of Nokia’s high line final yr, and the following goal is to push the enterprise “to double-digit” territory, primarily by means of natural progress and smaller acquisitions, the CEO mentioned.
Nonetheless, Nokia dominated out taking the street of its foremost competitor Ericsson AB, whose $6.2 billion acquisition of Vonage Holdings Corp. was sparked by an analogous goal to develop on the enterprise aspect.
Nokia lately regained an investment-grade BBB- ranking from S&P World Scores, ending its greater than decade-long slog in junk territory. Nonetheless, Lundmark sees extra work to do, significantly on the corporate’s working margins.
“We aren’t completely satisfied but with the place we’re,” he mentioned.
Discover ways to navigate and strengthen belief in your corporation with The Belief Issue, a weekly e-newsletter analyzing what leaders must succeed. Sign up here.
