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Nokia - From Start to Finnish

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 9/19/2005

Some companies have at least nine lives, it would seem. Nokia was founded in southwestern Finland, in 1865, by a mining engineer, one, Frederik Idestam, as a wood-pulp mill. An eponymous town formed around it. Independently, the Finnish Rubber Works took on the town name in the 1920s, having been established there in 1898.

The Nokia rubber company acquired Finnish Cable Works - another enterprise located in Nokia since 1912. In 1967, the three became the Nokia Group. In the 1980s, Nokia took over Mobira, Salora, Televa and Luxor of Sweden and became a consumer electronics group - manufacturing televisions and such.

Nokia continued with its acquisitions spree and, in 1987, bought the consumer electronics operations and part of the component business of the German Standard Elektrik Lorenz, the French consumer electronics company Oceanic, and the Swiss cable machinery company Maillefer. It proceeded to become the largest Scandinavian information technology company by digesting Ericsson's data systems division. In 1989, Nokia emerged as a leader in the cable industry in Continental Europe by purchasing the Dutch cable company NKF.

During the 1990s the consolidated group refocused on the mobile phone market and divested all its other businesses.