What happened? End the telecom giant Nokia announced that the company is rebranding and, for the first time in almost six decades, changing its logo. The move is part of a strategy to disassociate Nokia from smartphones, which it hasn’t done in nearly ten years.
On the eve of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia announced a new corporate logo made up of five different shapes to form the company’s name. The famous blue-colored letter of old has been replaced in favor of a different color that changes depending on the use.
Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark told Reuters, “There is an association with smartphones and now we are a business technology company.”
Nokia hasn’t made a smartphone since the Nokia Lumia 1020 in 2013, the year before Microsoft bought the mobile phone business – and we know how that works. Microsoft sold the Nokia-branded feature phone business to HMD Global in 2016.
Due to a long-term licensing agreement between the companies, phones bearing the Nokia name produced by HMD Global have been around since 2017 and are still being released today. The Nokia G22, a phone designed to be easily repaired thanks to repair guides and tools developed in collaboration with iFixit, was announced yesterday. The battery can be replaced in five minutes, and the replacement of the screen is possible in about 20 minutes.
“In most people’s minds, we are still a successful mobile phone brand, but this is not what Nokia is about,” Lundmark told Bloomberg. The CEO said Nokia wants to launch a new brand focused on networks and industrial digitalization, “which is completely different from legacy mobile phones.”
Nokia hopes to increase its market share when it comes to serving wireless service providers with network equipment, something that should be easier now that Huawei has been banned from selling its 5G networking gear to many country. But Nokia’s main focus is the sale of equipment to private companies, an area that accounted for 8% of its revenue last year, or about 2 billion euros (approximately $2.11 billion). Lundmark says Nokia’s goal is to get that number to double digits as quickly as possible.