Introduction
Nokia has existed for ages. Actually, longer than any human being alive today. Over the years, as is expected of any business, it has changed its logo and corporate identity over and over again. However, as many of us can relate, the company has stuck by its logo for as long as we’ve known it.
According to the company, the last time it changed its logo was 60 years ago. Not even my dad had been born.
Fast forward to yesterday and Nokia has announced a big change: it is changing its logo and corporate identity.
The reason?
Well, this is going to be a long story, buckle up.
The backstory
The story starts in the early 2010s when Nokia was going through a transition that had seen them poach Stephen Elop from Microsoft to become their CEO. Faced with a changing world that was largely influenced by Apple’s revolutionary iPhone released just 2 years earlier, the world was increasingly being seen from an iOS or Android lens. iOS was the platform that the iPhone ran on while Android was the mobile operating system that Google had bought and propped as a formidable competitor to the iPhone.
In the rearview mirror was BlackBerry OS which powered the devices from Canada’s Research In Motion (RIM, later known as just BlackBerry), the company behind the BlackBerry phones, and Symbian the once open-source platform that had powered Samsung and Sony Ericsson phones before the two abandoned it and jumped ship to Android, forcing Nokia to take it back and close it once again.
At that point, Symbian already looked like a platform that belonged to the ages and Nokia’s partnership with Intel, which had birthed a new platform, MeeGo, didn’t look as promising as many Nokia insiders thought it would. Elop, an outsider, was keen on making Nokia competitive. To do that, he was faced with a dilemma: join ex-partners Samsung and Sony Ericcson and other device makers in the Google-led Android bandwagon or bet its life on Microsoft’s then-nascent Windows Phone platform? As it turned out, for an ex-Microsoft-ie, the choice was very easy.
Nokia threw its hat in the ring with Microsoft, a partnership that would see it churn such beauties as the Lumia 920. The partnership was marked by an increased focus on a market that had never embraced Nokia, anyway, that is the North American market, and a near neglect of the rest of the world that had showered Nokia with love throughout the 90s and 2000s.
A few years later, faced with increased haemorrhaging as a result of an overall failure to bring in as much money as the optimism that existed among fans and staff of its Microsoft Windows-powered smartphones and Asha feature phones in developing countries like Kenya, Nokia agreed to sell off its mobile division to Microsoft. While the sale to Microsoft may have been out of the need for the Finnish company to maintain positivity in its books and avoid its loss-making mobile unit, Microsoft is said to have been inspired by the need to not have Nokia go the Android way.
Anyway, Nokia would still introduce its first ever Android smartphone with the Nokia X that debuted 10 years ago, just weeks after the Microsoft acquisition was made public and waited for regulatory approvals to close.
At this point, there are two Nokias. if you are following. There is Nokia the Finnish company that has just sold its mobile division to Microsoft and there is the Nokia that has been bought by Microsoft. The latter was, then, essentially Microsoft’s mobile devices arm (called Microsoft Mobile) but it maintained the Nokia branding for familiarity’s sake and acceptance in the market.
3 years later, in 2016, Microsoft sold off the mobile arm that it had bought from Nokia to two entities: HMD Global and FIH Mobile. HMD Global was a new Finnish company with links to former Nokia staffers that would be responsible for the smartphone side of the business while FIH Mobile was a Foxconn subsidiary that would handle the feature phone side of the business. Foxconn is a multinational contract technology manufacturer that is responsible for just about everything “techy” we use and is most famous for its involvement in the manufacture of the iPhone.
As can be attested to by our continued coverage of Nokia mobile phones over the years, with the first smartphones from HMD Global entering the Kenyan market in 2017 and continuing to be launched locally to date, the Nokia name and brand have stuck.
While this is so, that Nokia name and brand have nothing much to do with Nokia the company directly or operations-wise. The company licenses its name in an agreement with HMD Global.
Remember that what we know and refer to as “Nokia” is that mobile division it sold off to Microsoft and became Microsoft Mobile, a decade ago, before Microsoft also parted ways with it and sold it off to HMD Global and FIH Mobile. The rest of the company (Nokia) remained and is operational to date. It is still a household name in the mobile industry but on the networking side of things. It has since bought other notable players in the networking side of things (that have also had a notable presence in the mobile phone business) like Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent.
It also has other interests in scientific research, software development, venture funding and others in the form of subsidiaries, in addition to its widely-known networking business. Its technologies subsidiary, Nokia Technologies, is responsible for that OZO that we keep on referencing in our articles which is responsible for some cool progressive advancements in audio and visual tech. HMD Global licenses the technologies just like any other interested party would.
Nokia is one of HMD Global’s shareholders, from an investment round 3 years ago that got it a 10% stake in the company. Google, Qualcomm and FIH Mobile are some of the other shareholders in HMD Global.
It is leading the charge in the adoption of 5G networks around the world and, in the wake of the controversies regarding the use of Chinese technology (read, Huawei) in mobile networks around the world, has swiftly stepped in to offer the services around the world, including in Kenya where it is one of the vendors sourced by Safaricom to do the same. Nokia has been a longtime Safaricom supplier with a relationship that goes back to the company’s founding in 1999.
(An aside: TCL, a notable Android device maker these days and a renowned TV and other consumer electronics and home appliances brand, licenses the Alcatel brand name from Nokia for use in its mobile devices. Nokia owns the Alcatel brand from its Alcatel-Lucent acquisition).
Nokia today
So, it is this Nokia that is having a rebrand, and a new logo. Out of the need to distinguish itself from its licensees which still use the Nokia name and keep the Yale blue Nokia logo that we all know – and some love.
“We want to launch a new brand that is focusing very much on the networks and industrial digitalization, which is a completely different thing from the legacy mobile phones,” Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark has told sections of the press. He has penned as much.
We will still see the old Nokia logo on any new feature phone, smartphone and tablet releases we get from licensee HMD Global, like the latest ones it has just unveiled at MWC 2023 in Barcelona, Spain.
