How Nokia Went From Paper Mill to Mobile Phones

Nokia's history sounds like a company jumping from paper to boots to cables to phones. The real story is slightly messier and more interesting. Several Finnish industrial businesses eventually merged, and telecommunications grew out of the cable and electronics side of the combined company.

What the video covers

The first business really was a pulp mill

Nokia's official corporate history begins in 1865, when mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established a wood-pulp mill near Tampere, Finland. He opened a second mill near the Nokianvirta River a few years later. The company eventually took its name from Nokia, the nearby town and river. So the river connection is real, but the first 1865 mill was not actually built there.

Rubber and cable were originally separate companies

Nokia's annual histories explain that the familiar sequence was not one founder casually deciding to make a new product every decade. Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works had separate origins. In 1967, Nokia Ab, Finnish Rubber Works, and Finnish Cable Works formally merged into the modern Nokia Corporation, creating a conglomerate that made products ranging from paper and boots to cables and electronics.

Cable technology created a path toward electronics

Nokia says telecommunications activity can be traced deep into its cable-company heritage. By the 1960s the combined businesses were developing electronics alongside traditional industrial products. After European telecom markets changed during the 1980s, Nokia pushed harder into digital switching and mobile communications. In 1982 it introduced a digital telephone exchange and a car phone for the Nordic Mobile Telephone network.

The first GSM call helped define the next company

Nokia's corporate history records that the world's first commercial GSM call was made in Finland in 1991 using a Nokia phone on a network built with Nokia equipment. During the 1990s, management sold or separated many older businesses and concentrated on telecommunications. By 1998 Nokia had become the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, a position it maintained for more than a decade.

Its peak was huge, but not quite half of every phone

Nokia's 2008 annual filing estimated its share of the global mobile-device market at 39 percent. That is extraordinary, but it corrects the common claim that Nokia made nearly half of all phones on Earth. In one narrower category, smartphones, Nokia estimated a 52 percent share in 2007. The company's later smartphone decline does not erase how dominant its broader mobile business once became.

Where this story comes from

The broad history appears in the Wikipedia article “Nokia.” A useful primary source is Nokia's 2008 Form 20-F annual filing, where the company reported shipment volumes and its own estimate of global market share. Earlier corporate records trace Fredrik Idestam's mills and the 1967 merger that joined Nokia Ab, Finnish Rubber Works, and Finnish Cable Works.

Why a shirt company tells this story

Nokia's story belongs to engineers, business students, Finnish-history fans, telecom workers, designers, and people who remember when nearly everyone seemed to own one of its phones. A design might use a pulp-mill wheel, cable cross-section, old handset outline, or a timeline showing how unrelated-looking technologies connect. It can be printed or embroidered on one shirt with no minimum. The story is a good reminder that companies rarely know their final form when they begin. They keep following the next useful skill.

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