Nokia Rise and Fall EMSE 6005.10 – Organizational Behavior For The Engineering Managers Professor Andy Sakka Abhishek Thakur Akshat Amrut Oswal Oswal
Nokia history: Nokia was founded by Fredrik Idestam, a mining engineer in 1865. The name Nokia was decided in 1871 when he opened his second paper mill on the bank of Nokianvirta river. Nokia started out with making paper which incidentally was one of the very first technologies used for communications. Fredrik Idestam was the chairman of the company till 1896 when he retired, and Leo Mechelin took over as the chairman. Under Mechelin, Nokia started a new business unit of electricity generation. In 1898, Eduard Polon founded the Finnish Rubber Works, which later became Nokia’s rubber business. They were making everything from galoshes to tires. In 1912, Finnish Cable Works was established by Arvid Wickstrom, which later became Nokia’s cable and electronic business. In 1967, all three of these jointly owned companies came together to form the Nokia corporation. Nokia’s No kia’s first thrust in telecommunications telecommunications came when they began developing radio telephones for the army and emergency services. During this period, the company was involved in many businesses including paper products, tire manufacturing, footwears, communication cables, televisions , electricity generation machinery, robotics , chemicals, plastics and many more. By 1987,, Nokia became one of the leading manufacturers of
TV in Europe. By 1990, Nokia decided to concentrate its efforts on the fastest growing business of telecommunications & leave all other companies behind. They sold out all other business divisions.
An Era of Communication Nokia was not a new player in telecommunication field when they started concentrating on it in 1990’s. Instead , they had the ball rolling from 1979 when they created a radio telephone company Mobira Oy as a joint venture with one of the leading TV maker Salora in Finland. They started with the Nokia DX 200 which was a digital switch
for telephone exchanges. They worked on the development of a version of exchange & Nordic Mobile Telephony network was born.
Source: http://www.Nokiamusuem.info In 1987, GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) is adopted as the European standard for digital mobile technology. This new technology revolutionized the telecommunication industry with its high-quality voice calls, international roaming and support for text messages.
The Growth of a Mobile Giant Nokia truly entered a new age GSM cell phone time with their Nokia 1011 model which was launched in 1992. During this time, Finland was undergoing a severe economic meltdown and Nokia was also in a severely crunched economic situation.
In 1994, Nokia launched their
2100 series phones which were the first phones with the now famous Nokia ringtone in them. Nokia had planned a target to sell 400,000 of these phones which was a big number at that time, but they got lucky and it turned out to be such a huge success that they sold over 20 million devices worldwide. This was truly the start of the ride for Nokia atop the cellphone business.
Source: ETLA – The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy
As the graph, clearly depicts, Nokia was the clear the gorilla in the cellphone market in 1990’s, with almost 100% market share. As the time, moved towards the next century competition for Nokia grew but still they were able to hold onto their market leader position. From 1996 to 2001, Nokia’s turnover increased almost fivefold from EUR 6.5 billion to EUR 31 billion. With the start of the next century Nokia just kept on growing bigger & bigger becoming the leader in the mobile technology. In 1999, Nokia launched the Nokia 7110 which was the first phone capable of rudimentary web-based functions including emails. Within 2 years Nokia launched its first phone with a built-in camera and again in September 2002 they came out with a phone capable of capturing videos i.e. the Nokia 3650. During this time, there was a huge number new patented technology coming out from the Research and Development division of Nokia, which was helping their share prices soar to the sky.
source:http://envisionip.com/blog/2012/07/19/530/ Nokia launched the 6650 with 3G technology in 2002 and by 2005 Nokia had sold its billionth phone which was a Nokia 1100 in Nigeria.In 2007, Nokia was recognized as the 5th most valued brand in the world.
The Stumbling Giant Originally in 2007 after the release of iPhone, Nokia smartphones like Nokia N95 with Symbian OS outsold the iPhone and had a dominating 62.5% market share in Q4 of 2007 ahead of Microsoft’s Windows mobile
OS and RIM’s BlackBerry. As the competition grew fierce in 2008, Apple’s iPhone 3G hit the market which started the rise of the new kind of smartphone within the cellphone space. As Nokia felt intimidated, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, tried everything in his power to tackle this new threat but Nokia’s pie was being snatched away slowly. The graph below shows how Nokia was affected when Apple started manufacturing iPhones in 2008. But when the iPhone 3rd Generation phones hit the market with the new refined iOS operating system it quickly doubled the market share for Apple and reduced the Nokia’s share along with others. Nokia was still the market leader with a 40.8% market share in Q4 2008 with its new smartphone like Nokia 5800 Xpress music and Nokia E71 but was declining. In 2008, Nokia bought the Symbian operating system and the following year made it open source so that more & more apps could be developed for Symbian operating system. But this step couldn’t turn the fortunes of Nokia as in 2009 their market share of Symbian fell to 46.1% in Q4 2009 from 52.4% in Q4 2008. But in 2010 everything started to fall apart for Nokia as Google with its Android operating system along with Apple with the iOS started to eat into Nokia’s business, and the other Symbian makers including Samsung and Sony Ericsson decided to take up Android as their new operating system.
In mid-2010, Nokia was the only OEM to manufacture devices with the Symbian OS while they were contemplating to adapt to newer Operating Systems.
WHAT WENT WRONG? We will take use the 3 primary lenses which enable the process to analyze where Nokia possibly went wrong. Nokia made choices, we feel, it shouldn’t have and will note these in our analysis below.
I) Strategy Symbian OS was created by Symbian Ltd., which was a joint venture between Psion, and phone manufacturers Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia. Symbion was the most popular smartphone OS on a global average till Q4 2010 with Nokia having Symbian as the OS in its all flagship phones. In June 2008, Nokia acquired Symbian Ltd. under a decision to make the Symbian OS open-source platform so that more developers can use it to develop their mobile apps. In February 2010, it was officially made available as open source code. But it was a little too late as Android, which was already open-source and freely available, and iOS has already started to eat into Symbian market pie with their advanced platforms & a huge number of support applications on the smartphones.
On February 11, 2011 Nokia announced partnership with Microsoft and carry their OS i.e. Windows OS in their smartphones. A study in June 2011 showed that over 39% of the mobile developers using Symbian had planned to abandon the platform for either Android or IOS. By June 2011,, Nokia had made a deal with Accenture for Symbian based software development and support services through 2016 which also saw 2800 of Nokia employees moving base to Accenture.
II) Technology Nokia was a pioneer of technology in mobiles and cellphones. Nokia came a long way to reach that state, but only due to aging staff and technology could not stand to the new wave of competition. Nokia. Nokia had the Mobira series from 1982-1990 which were very popular during its times. From 1990- 1999, Nokia sold the Original series of phones, which also saw the inclusion of a newly developed GSM technology. Nokia later went forward to production colour screen phones, digital camera featured phones and even music capable phones. Nokia also had a gaming series of phones which were selling like hot pancakes amongst teenagers. They indirectly took over Sony’s walkman, Apple’s iPod and other related product’s market share. Nokia later had business series phones with push email and other corporate benefitting features.
Later on they used to Symbian OS and were literally on top of the world with their remarkably smart featured phones. But by this time, Nokia had reached the peak of its research and development cycles. What they needed to do was to usher in a revolutionary new technology to continue dominating the market after 2007. But this was brought in by a new breed of engineers working at Apple and Google, who came up with iOS and Android Operating Systems. Nokia still believed that it's Symbian OS was capable of fighting this decision but eventually realized it were not worth the fight and started looking for new OS partners. In 2009, Nokia developed MaeMo OS, which was later terminated in favor of Maemo OS. These OS was developed inhouse and then handed over to a contractor for developing apps for them. Although initially it attracted developers, it lacked the charm iOS and Android had to offer. This was when Nokia decided to go out in the market to look for a partner for their amazing hardware devices. After their tie-up with Microsoft for its Mobile Platform OS Windows 7.5 Mango, Nokia launched the Lumia series, which featured revolutionary hardware advancements. The Nokia Lumia 1020 had a staggering 41 MP Carl Zeiss camera. Lumia 610 featured NFC which is the top of the class wireless transfer technology. But by then Nokia was all stripped down of its glory. Nokia also launched the Asha set in India and other developing nations, which once were its strongholds, but they performed averagely.
It wasn’t until January 25th, 2013 that Nokia announced it would stop shipping Symbian phones. By then Nokia was shipping only Windows OS based phones. Nokia had to train an entire division of people for the task such as writing Operating system level code to developing apps for it. In September, 2013, Microsoft announced it will be buying Nokia’s mobile business for $7.2 billion. This signifies the buyout of a failed company by a giant which caused it to fail in the first case.
III) People We have mentioned above the various CEOs of Nokia and their valuable contribution to the company. In September 2010, it was announced that Elop would take Nokia's CEO position, replacing OlliPekka Kallasvuo, and becoming the first non-Finnish director in Nokia's history. On 11 March 2011 Nokia announced that it had paid Elop a $6 million signing bonus, “compensation for lost income from his prior employer," on top of his $1.4 million annual salary. As soon as Stephen Elop took over he sent an internal memo to his employees which got leaked to the press. The memo dubbed as ‘ Burning platform’ was one of its kind and regarded as one of the most ridiculous corporate memo. Below is a glimpse of its content. There is a pertinent story about a man who was working on an oil platform in the North Sea. He woke up one night from a loud explosion, which suddenly
set his entire oil platform on fire. In mere moments, he was surrounded by flames. Through the sm oke and heat, he barely made his way out of the chaos to the platform’s edge. When he looked down over the edge, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters.
As the fire approached him, the man had mere seconds to react. He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames. Or, he could plunge 30 meters in to the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a “burning platform,” and he needed to make a choice.
He decided to jump. It was unexpected. In ordinary circumstances, the man would never consider plunging into icy waters. But these were not ordinary times
–
his platform was on fire. The man survived the fall and the waters. After he was rescued, he noted that a “burning platform” caused a radical change i n his behaviour.
We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must determine how we are
going to change our behaviour.
Over the past few months, I’ve shared with you what I’ve heard from our
shareholders, operators, developers, suppliers andyou. Now,
I’m going to share what
I’ve learned and what I have come to believe.
I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform.
And, we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us.
For example, there is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.
In 2008, Apple’s market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010
it escalated to 61 percent. They are enjoying a tremendous growth trajectory with a 78 percent earnings growth year over year in Q4 2010. Apple demonstrated that if designed well, consumers would buy a high-priced phone with a great experience and developers would build applications. They changed the game, and today, Apple owns the high-end range.
And then, there is Android. In about two years, Android created a platform that attracts application developers, service providers and hardware manufacturers. Android came in at the high-end, they are now winning the mid-range, and quickly they are going downstream to phones under €100. Google has become a gravitational force, drawing much of the industry’s innovati on to its core.
Let’s not forget about the low -end price range. In 2008, MediaTek supplied
complete reference designs for phone chipsets, which enabled manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China to produce phones at an unbelievable pace. By some accounts, this ecosystem now produces more than one third of the phones sold globally
– taking
share from us in emerging markets.
While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.
The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is
close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.
We have some brilliant sources of innovation inside Nokia, but we are not bringing it to market fast enough. We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning
high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
At the midrange, we have Symbian. It has proven to be non-competitive in leading markets like North America. Additionally, Symbian is proving to be an increasingly difficult environment in which to develop to meet the continuously expanding consumer requirements, leading to slowness in product development and also creating a disadvantage when we seek to take advantage of new hardware platforms. As a result, if we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further and further ahead.
At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and
they are challenging us.
And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right
weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-todevice basis.
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, e-commerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking
our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re goi ng to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or
join an ecosystem.
This is one of the decisions we need to make. In the meantime, we’ve lost market share, we’ve lost mind share and we’ve lost time.
On Tuesday, Standard & Poor’s informed that they wil l put our ‘A’ long term and ‘A-1’ short term ratings on negative credit watch. This is a similar rating action to the one that Moody’s took last week. Basically it means that during the
next few weeks they will make an analysis of Nokia, and decide on a possible credit rating downgrade. Why are these credit agencies contemplating these changes? Because they are concerned about our competitiveness.
Consumer preference for Nokia declined worldwide. In the UK, our brand preference has slipped to 20 percent, which is 8 percent lower than last year. That means only 1 out of 5 people in the UK prefer Nokia to other brands. It’s also down
in the other markets, which are traditionally our strongholds: Russia, Germany, Indonesia, UAE, and on and on and on.
How did we get to this point? Why did we fall behind when the world around us evolved?
This is what I have been trying to understand. I believe at least some of it has been due to our attitude inside Nokia. We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally.
Nokia, our platform is burning.
We are working on a path forward — a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on February 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company. But, I believe that together, we can face the challenges ahead of us. Together, we can choose to define our future.
The burning platform, upon which the man found himself, caused the man to shift his behavior, and take a bold and brave step into an uncertain future. He was able to tell his story. Now, we have a great opportunity to do the same.
Stephen.
This memo though honest, demoralized many employees. It made them believe they are the reason why the company is where it is now. But this memo nowhere made it clear what the exact strategy would be. This memo also shows how irresponsible as a CEO Stephen Elop was and its effect on the company.
Conspiracy Theory: Stephen Elop’s career has a reputation of either l eaving soon enough or a takeover of the company he works in. He was CEO for Elop was a director of consulting for Lotus Development Corporation before becoming CIO for Boston Chicken in 1992,which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998. In the same year, he joined Macromedia's Web/IT department holding senior positions, like being CEO from January 2005 for three months before they were brought by Adobe Systems in April 2005. He was the president of worldwide field operations at Adobe, and resigned in June 2006, after which he became the COO of Juniper Networks from January 2007 – 2008. From Jan 2008 - Sep 2010, Stephen Elop was employed at Microsoft and was heading the Business Division.
His work domain included Microsoft Office and Microsoft Dynamics line of products. He left Microsoft in September 2010 and joined Nokia, becoming the first non-Finnish CEO in its entire history. He made decisions of moving towards Microsoft’s Mobile platform and led the company into the abyss. During Elop's tenure, Nokia annual revenues fell 40% from 41.7 Billion Euros per year to 25.3 Billion Euros per year. Nokia profits fell 92% from 2.4 Billion Euros per year to 188 Million Euros per year. Nokia handset sales fell 40% from 456 million units per year to 274 million units per year. Nokia's A ranking among all three ratings agencies was downgraded repeatedly all through his tenure with no upgrades, and when he left office all three ratings agencies rated Nokia as junk. Nokia's Fortune Global 500 ranking was 120th largest business on the planet when Elop started and by the time he left Nokia it was at 274 th position. The sale of the handset unit to Microsoft which was later approved by Nokia shareholders and the remaining revenues will mean that Nokia would be kicked out of the Fortune Global 500. Nokia’s share prices which were 7.12 Euros on the day Elop was hired and dropped to 1.44 Euros, down by 81% . They rose by a small margin once rumors of Microsoft’s acqu isition plans reached the market.
Elop’s Decisions In February 2011, Elop showcased a new approach for Nokia, shifting its smartphone policy to Microsoft's Windows Phone, which also included the discontinuation of both of their in-house mobile operating systems. The phase-out of Symbian was to be carried out during the next years, expecting it to be finalized by 2013. All programs for others devices were terminated immediately. The first Nokia Windows Phone smartphone was sold in Nov 2011, the Nokia Lumia 800, was made in the form of a device design identically similar to
the Nokia N9, the first MeeGo mobile.
Elop stated the reason for switching to Windows instead of Android: "the single most important word is 'differentiation'. Entering the Android environment late, we knew we would have a hard time differentiating." During his tenure, Elop faced vocal criticism from both industry specialists and employees. In 2011, Elop announced that some 11,000 employees would have to be laid off as part of a plan to "restructure" Nokia's business, and in June 2012 it was announced that further 10,000 layoffs were in order and that many services would have to be closed down due to budget cuts. Experts started to speculate that Elop could be a rouge agent, whose mission was to prepare Nokia for a future acquisition by Microsoft. When confronted with this theory by an anonymous attendee at the 2011 Mobile World Congress, Elop denied the speculation stating, "The obvious answer is, no. But, however, I am very sensitive to the perception and awkwardness of that situation. We made sure that the entire management team was involved in the process; everyone on the management team believed this was the best decision," referring to Nokia's adoption of Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. Speculators say that Elop indirectly prepared Nokia for Microsoft’s acquisition and intentionally devalued the company’s assets and image. More fuel was added to the fire, when Microsoft
announced a signing bonus of €18.8 million. Ironically, both the deals were signed on the same day which further made investors furious. Process Failure: After analyzing through the 3 lenses, we feel Nokia failed as a whole and not due to an individual aspect. Life is a cycle, and only thing that is permanent is change. Nokia had reached the peak of its glory and the only way from there seemed to be downward unless they changed their processes. Change did come but was late and futile. Nokia had its ups and downs and now soon enough we hope it will recapture its glory. Another outcome of this entire debacle was some of the Nokia employees leaving the company to create another which would produce the quality of devices with more popular operating systems. Although this is just the beginning only time can tell us what lays ahead for Nokia.
Conclusion The research in this paper digs into the role of Stephen Elop as a contributing factor in the failure of Nokia as a company. The conspiracy theory states that even though Stephen Elop came from Microsoft to Nokia but against all the ethical rules of professionalism but he continued to make decisions which were beneficial for Microsoft. The argument is supported by the facts and statistical data given in the paper on how Nokia went on a downward spiral after Stephen Elop joined as the CEO. His decisions of only carrying the Windows operating system in all of their phones & abandoning all other operating systems did no good for the company ’s performance in the business. His decision of not going for the Android OS after Symbian while the other mobile carriers such as Samsung, Sony Ericson did, eventually led to Nokia losing a major market share. The sales of Nokia dropped over the period of his tenure which eventually led Nokia being sold to Microsoft. Our research in this paper digs deeper into the role of Stephen Elop in the downfall of Nokia. We wonder what would have been if Nokia would have embraced Android as it is the biggest smartphone operating system in the world by far. Soon after being sold to Microsoft, ousted employees are on the look for investors to manufacture same quality hardware devices with a variety of Operating Systems other than Windows.
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