Nokia began on May 12, 1865, when mining engineer Fredrik Idestam opened a pulp mill by the Tammerkoski rapids near Tampere, then in the Grand Duchy of Finland. A second mill at the town of Nokia gave the firm its name in 1871, when Idestam and Leo Mechelin formed Nokia Ab. Rubber works under Eduard Polón grew up beside it. In 1967 the paper, cable, and rubber companies merged into Nokia Corporation.
Electronics and radio pulled the conglomerate toward phones. Mobira, a 1979 joint venture, became Nokia’s handset line. Nokia helped write GSM, then spent a decade from 1998 as the world’s largest mobile-phone vendor. It co-founded Symbian Ltd. that same year. The Nokia 7650 (2002) put S60 in people’s pockets. Preloaded Snake made casual games ordinary on a phone. The N-Gage (2003) tried to be a handheld and failed to dent the Game Boy.
A Microsoft alliance in 2011 put Windows Phone on Lumia flagships. In September 2013 Nokia agreed to sell its devices business; Microsoft closed the deal in 2014. Nokia doubled down on networks, bought out Siemens in Nokia Siemens Networks, and absorbed Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs. In 2016 HMD Global licensed the Nokia name back onto phones.
Headquarters sit in Espoo, in the Helsinki area. The company still licenses patents to most large handset makers and ranks among the top network-equipment vendors. For players, Nokia is the firm that treated a phone as a games machine—first with Snake and Symbian titles, then with the short-lived N-Gage.
Nokia Corporate Snapshot
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Founded | May 12, 1865 (Tampere, Grand Duchy of Finland) |
| Founders | Fredrik Idestam; later Leo Mechelin and Eduard Polón |
| Headquarters | Espoo, Finland |
| Signature platforms | GSM / S60 Symbian phones; N-Gage (2003); Nokia Networks |
| Peak phones | World’s largest mobile-phone vendor, about 1998–2008 |
| Later ownership | Devices sold to Microsoft (2014); phone brand licensed to HMD Global (2016–) |
| Current status | Public telecom and technology company (Nokia Networks, Nokia Technologies, Bell Labs) |