BARCELONA 26 Feb (Online): Nokia (NOKIA.HE) announced plans on Sunday to change its brand identity for the first time in nearly 60 years, complete with a new logo, as the telecom equipment maker focuses on aggressive growth.<\/p>\n
The new logo comprises five different shapes forming the word NOKIA. The iconic blue colour of the old logo has been dropped for a range of colours depending on the use.<\/p>\n
“There was the association to smartphones and nowadays we are a business technology company,” Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark told Reuters in an interview.<\/p>\n
He was speaking ahead of a business update by the company on the eve of the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) which opens in Barcelona on Monday and runs until March 2.<\/p>\n
After taking over the top job at the struggling Finnish company in 2020, Lundmark set out a strategy with three stages: reset, accelerate and scale. With the reset stage now complete, Lundmark said the second stage is beginning.<\/p>\n
While Nokia still aims to grow its service provider business, where it sells equipment to telecom companies, its main focus is now to sell gear to other businesses.<\/p>\n
“We had very good 21% growth last year in enterprise, which is currently about 8% of our sales, (or) 2 billion euros ($2.11 billion) roughly,” Lundmark said. “We want to take that to double digits as quickly as possible.”<\/p>\n
Major technology firms have been partnering with telecom gear makers such as Nokia to sell private 5G networks and gears for automated factories to customers, mostly in the manufacturing sector.<\/p>\n
Nokia plans to review the growth path of its different businesses and consider alternatives, including divestment.<\/p>\n
“The signal is very clear. We only want to be in businesses where we can see global leadership,” Lundmark said.<\/p>\n
Nokia’s move toward factory automation and datacentres will also see them locking horns with big tech companies, such as Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Amazon (AMZN.O).<\/p>\n
“There will be multiple different types of cases, sometimes they will be our partners … sometimes they can be our customers… and I am sure that there will also be situations where they will be competitors.”<\/p>\n
The market to sell telecom gear is under pressure with macro environment denting demand from high-margin markets such as North America, being replaced by growth in low-margin India, pushing rival Ericsson to lay off 8,500 employees.<\/p>\n
“India is our fastest growing market that has lower margins – this is a structural change,” Lundmark said, adding that Nokia expects North America to be stronger in the second half of the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BARCELONA 26 Feb (Online): Nokia (NOKIA.HE) announced plans on Sunday to change its brand identity for the first time in nearly 60 years, complete with a new logo, as the telecom equipment maker focuses on aggressive growth. The new logo comprises five different shapes forming […]<\/p>\n
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