Hello and welcome back to the Deep Dive. It is
Saturday, February 14th, 2026. Happy Valentine's
Day. Happy Valentine's Day. So whether you're
celebrating with someone or, you know, just enjoying
a quiet Saturday, we're really glad to have you
with us. Definitely. Today we're doing something
a little bit different. We usually try to look
forward at AI, at space, at the next big thing
in biotop. But today, to really understand the
future. I think we have to look back. I agree.
Sometimes the past is the best map. And we are
dissecting a brand that I guarantee, absolutely
guarantee, you have a visceral emotional memory
of. Oh, for sure. It's one of those rare corporate
names that actually triggers nostalgia. You hear
it and you don't think of a stock price. You
think of a specific time and place in your life.
Exactly. I'm talking about Nokia. And right now
I know what you're picturing. The brick? The
brick. The Nokia 3D 310. The game Snake. And
that... That monophonic ringtone that is probably
burrowing its way into your head right this second.
Connecting people. It was, I mean, it was the
soundtrack for a whole generation. But here's
the hook. And this is why we're doing this deep
dive today. If you think Nokia is just this,
you know, tragic story about a cell phone company
that got crushed by the iPhone and then just
disappeared. Then you're missing the real story.
You're missing about 90 % of the actual story.
It's so much stranger and honestly darker, but
also more impressive than that. Okay, so get
this. Yeah. We are talking about a company that
started its life in the 19th century making toilet
paper. And rubber boots. Don't forget the rubber
boots. And gas masks for the military. A company
that navigated the entire Cold War by cutting
these... Like secret deals with the Soviet Union.
A company that once built a car phone. Oh, the
car phone. That weighed nearly 10 kilograms.
That's 22 pounds. It's basically a suitcase with
a handset. And maybe the most surprising thing
of all, a company that is right now in 2026 building
a 4G cellular network on the surface of the moon.
See, it's not just about phones. Not at all.
It's the ultimate masterclass in corporate adaptability.
That's really the theme for today. Survival.
Right. It's about how this pulp mill became a
global tech tyrant, lost it all in a crash so
spectacular that business schools will be studying
it for the next century. They already are. And
then quietly, almost invisibly, reinvented itself
as the backbone of the modern Internet. I love
a good comeback story. And this one has everything.
It has galoshes and lunar rovers. So our mission
today is to unpack this whole history. We're
using the archives, the financial records. And
we really need to figure out how did they do
it? Why did they fail so spectacularly? And what
on earth are they doing now? And just to set
the tone, we need to move past the memes. You
know, we all make jokes about the indestructible
phones. Breaking the floor if you drop them.
Right. But the reality of Nokia's history is
way more complex. It's a story of brutal, absolutely
brutal strategic pivots. Okay, so let's rewind.
And we're not starting in the 1990s with cool
phones. No, no. We have to go way, way back.
I'm going back to 1865. 1865. And just to give
you some context, the American Civil War is just
ending. Wow. But we're halfway across the world
in the Grand Duchy of Finland. And Finland isn't
even its own country yet. It's part of the Russian
Empire. Exactly. It's under the rule of the Tsar.
And this mining engineer, a man named Frederick
Eidestam, decides to set up a pulp mill. A pulp
mill, as in grinding up wood to make paper. That's
it. He'd been to Germany. He saw this new tech
for making paper from wood pulp instead of rags,
and he brought it back to the Nordics. He sets
up his first mill near a city called Tampere.
Okay. But the location of the second mill, which
he builds in 1868, that's the one that really
matters for our story. He builds it on the banks
of the Nocunverter River. Nocunverter. Yeah.
It roughly translates to Sable River. It was
named after the small black -furred animals like
martens that used to live along the banks. And
the town nearby was called Nocunverter. Nokia.
The town was called Nokia. So the name. Yeah.
It literally comes from a place. It wasn't dreamed
up by a marketing team in some boardroom. It
was just geography. So company number one is
this forestry and power generation company, Nokia
Ab. Correct. But this is where we have to start
thinking with the industrial logic of that time.
You have a river. What does a river give you?
Water, obviously, and power. Hydropower. A massive,
reliable source of energy. So who else needs...
huge amounts of power and water to run their
factories. I have a feeling this is where the
rubber boots come in. It is. In 1898, a different
company, the Finnish rubber work Suman Gamitaitas,
sets up a factory right next door to the pulp
mill. To tap into that same hydropower. Precisely.
They're making galoshes, rubber tires, industrial
seals. All that stuff. I just can't get over
the image of the guys who eventually gave us
the Matrix phone. You know, the 8110, starting
out making rain boots. But it's so practical.
Think about Finland. You've got snow, slush,
mud for half the year. Good rubber boots are
high -tech survival gear in that climate. That's
a fair point. But then, in 1912, the third piece
of this puzzle arrives. A company called the
Cable Factory. Capuletatus. Okay, so we've got
paper, rubber, and cables. On the surface, it
seems completely random. Why are they all clustered
together on this one riverbank? It's not random
at all. Think about what an electrical cable
is. You have the conductor inside, right, usually
copper, but you need to insulate it, wrap it
in something so it doesn't short out. And the
best insulator in the early 20th century was
rubber. Exactly. The rubber factory was supplying
the insulation for the cable factory. and the
pulp mill's hydropower generators, supplying
the electricity to run the machines for both
of them. It was a vertically integrated industrial
ecosystem. It wasn't a random collection of companies
at all. It was this weird symbiotic cluster feeding
off the same river. That makes so much more sense.
So it wasn't that they were just eclectic for
the sake of it. Not at all. And for decades,
they all operated as separate legal companies.
But they had a lot of the same owners, a lot
of the same investors and families. And they
finally merged into the Nokia Corporation we
know in. What was it, 1967? 1967. A full century
after that first pulp mill opened its doors.
So by the time they officially merged, the product
portfolio must have been just wild. I was looking
at the list. In the mid -20th century, you could
walk into a store in Helsinki and buy Nokia -branded
toilet paper. They were producing soft tissue
paper well into the 1960s. It was a direct byproduct
of the pulp mill. You could buy Nokian rubber
boots, which, by the way, are still a thing.
I actually own a pair. They're fantastic. They
are. The tire and boot divisions were eventually
spun off. Nokian Tires is its own company now,
a very successful one. But they all originated
in that same riverbank cluster. And then, getting
a little more serious, a little darker, they
were making military equipment. Respirators.
The M61 gas mask for the Finnish defense forces.
That's the reality of being a massive industrial
conglomerate in a small country. You make what
the nation needs to survive. And Finland. geopolitically
was in a very, very tight spot. Which leads us
directly into the Cold War era. Right. Let's
unpack that. Because when I think of the origins
of major tech giants, you know, I think of Silicon
Valley, maybe. japan in the 80s i don't think
of a country sharing an 800 mile border with
the soviet union and that border defined everything
for them this is what we call the conglomerate
era from roughly 1967 to 1990. finland had to
navigate this incredibly delicate foreign policy
known as finlandization okay explain that basically
they remained officially neutral which kept the
west happy but to avoid being invaded or controlled
by moscow they had to maintain very close very
friendly economic ties with the USSR. The national
survival strategy. Exactly. And Nokia became
the economic engine of that strategy. They engaged
in something called bilateral clearing trade.
OK, so explain that mechanism, because it's not
like they were just writing checks to Moscow,
right? No, you couldn't. The Soviet ruble was
essentially worthless on the international market.
It wasn't convertible. So they used a highly
sophisticated barter system. A barter system.
Yeah. Finland would import massive amounts of
Soviet oil, natural gas and raw timber. In exchange,
the Soviet Union got a credit in a special account
to buy finished manufactured goods. So the Soviets
send oil and in return, Nokia sends what? In
the early days, cables. Miles and miles and miles
of telephone and power cables to help electrify
the Soviet Union. But as Nokia's electronics
division grew, they started sending more advanced
stuff. Right. Automatic telephone exchanges,
industrial robotics. By the late 70s and early
80s, the Soviet Union was a massive guaranteed
market for Nokia's high tech division. That sounds
incredibly lucrative. I mean, you don't have
to worry about marketing or competition. You
just sign a government treaty and start shipping
product. It was a total cash cow. While other
Western companies were fighting. tooth and nail
for 3 % margins in competitive markets like France
or West Germany, Nokia was setting on these fat,
state -guaranteed contracts with huge profits.
They were getting paid in oil money, essentially.
But the US government? They couldn't have been
thrilled about this. You've got a Western -leaning
country selling high -tech infrastructure to
the Red Army. They were deeply paranoid about
it. Washington watched Finland like a hawk. The
big concern was dual -use technology. Meaning
it could be used for civilian and military purposes.
Exactly. A digital telephone switch is great
for letting civilians call their grandmothers,
but it's also fantastic for military command
and control. So Nokia was walking a tightrope.
A very, very thin one. It got so tense that in
1987, Finland finally agreed to join COCOM, the
Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export
Controls. What was that? It was basically the
West saying, look, if you want to keep buying
our advanced microchips from Intel and Texas
Instruments to build your products, you have
to promise not to sell the best stuff to the
Soviets. But by then, Nokia had already made
a ton of money from that trade. They had. And
this is where the CEO, a man named Kari Kairamo,
enters the picture. He takes over in 1977. He
was this incredibly charismatic, high -energy,
some said slightly manic figure, and he had a
vision. The Nordic Japan. That was his phrase.
He looked at the vibe in the 80s, you know. Japan
was just taking over the world with Sony, Panasonic,
Toyota. Kairamo wanted Nokia to be that for Europe.
And he had the cash from the Soviet trade to
fund it. Exactly. He looked at that river of
money coming in and said, we are going to use
this to buy our way into the West. He went on
an absolutely massive acquisition spree. Right.
He bought Solora, a big Finnish TV maker. He
bought Luxor AB, the Swedish electronics giant.
He bought the French TV company Oceanic. I had
no idea until we started researching for this.
But at one point, Nokia was the third largest
television manufacturer in all of Europe. Behind
only Philips and Thompson. They were huge in
consumer electronics long before they were huge
in phones. They even made personal computers.
Micromico line. Yep. And they bought the beta
division from their Swedish rival Ericsson. They
were trying to do absolutely everything at once.
But Kairama's story, it has a really tragic ending.
It does. The stress of managing this sprawling,
chaotic, global empire, trying to integrate French
factories with Swedish engineers and Finnish
management, all while juggling the delicate politics
of the Soviet trade, It clearly took a massive
toll. He tragically took his own life in 1988.
Yeah. It's a really somber note in the corporate
history, and it highlights the immense pressure
of that kind of rapid, debt -fueled expansion.
And it left the company in a state of chaos right
as the world was about to fundamentally change.
But buried deep inside this massive, messy, grieving
conglomerate, there was this one little joint
venture. a division called Mobira. This is the
seed. This is 1979. 1979. Nokia teams up with
Celora, this is before they fully acquired them,
to create Mobira. And their goal was radio telephony.
Car phones. And in 1981, they helped launch the
NMT. The Nordic Mobile Telephone Service. And
this is the crucial piece of context, right?
This wasn't just another car phone network. No,
this was a game changer. Before NMT, car phone
systems were all national closed systems. If
you had a Swedish car phone and you drove across
the bridge to Denmark, it was a brick. It just
didn't work. So NMT was the first system that
allowed for it. It was the world's first international
cellular network. You could drive from Sweden
to Denmark to Norway to Finland and your phone
would keep working. It was the cellular internet
of its day. And to use this incredible new network,
you needed hardware. Which brings us to the Mobira
Senator in 1982. The Senator, an absolute icon
of clunky 80s tech. I was looking at the specs
again this morning. 9 .8 kilograms. 22 pounds.
Just try to picture that. Go to the gym, pick
up a 20 -pound dumbbell, and imagine holding
that to your ear. Well, you didn't hold it to
your ear. That's the thing. It was this big box
that you installed in the trunk of your car.
Right, with a handset wired up to the front dashboard.
So technically it was mobile, but only as mobile
as your Volvo was. But here's the really interesting
part. The Nokia board of directors hated it.
They didn't see the potential. Not at all. They
looked at the mobile division and just saw a
money pit. They called the phones James Bond
gadgets. As in, they were futuristic and cool,
but only for a tiny niche market. Exactly. They
saw it as a toy for millionaire playboys and
spies. They could not conceive of it as a mass
market product. But then came the city men. 1987.
The Mobira Cityman 900. Now, this was a handheld
phone. I mean, it was still a brick by today's
standards. Think of a big walkie -talkie from
an 80s action movie. But you could carry it.
You could carry it. And then marketing gold just
fell into their laps. Mikhail Gorbachev. The
leader of the Soviet Union. He was in Helsinki
for a state visit, and there's this famous photograph
of him standing outside his hotel, holding a
Mobira Cityman to his ear, making a call to his
ministers back in Moscow. It became known as
the Gorbaphone. That one image went viral before
viral was even a thing. It was this incredible
signal to the world. This wasn't just a toy anymore.
This was a tool of power. If the leader of the
entire Eastern Bloc is using a Nokia to run his
empire from a sidewalk in Finland... It's a serious
device. Put them on the map. Okay, so we're moving
into the 90s, and this is where the story shifts
gears. I mean, violently. 1990, 1991, the Berlin
Wall has fallen. Soviet Union collapses. And
for Nokia, this was an economic heart attack.
Because that bilateral clearing trade, that guaranteed
profit. It vanished overnight. Their biggest,
most profitable customer just ceased to exist.
The contracts were void. The whole country of
Finland plunged into a deep, deep depression.
And Nokia is bleeding money. Their stock price
crashes. They're this cluttered closet of all
these random businesses, TVs, cables, tires,
computers, and none of them are making enough
money to cover the losses from the Soviet collapse.
It was a near -death experience. And this is
when Jorma Olayla takes over as CEO in 1992.
And honestly, the logical move what any normal
CEO would have done was to break up the company
and sell off the assets. But he didn't do that.
No. He made one of the boldest, most audacious
bets in modern business history. The great focus.
He looked at this whole mess of a company. And
he said, we are selling everything, everything
that isn't phones, everything. The tires spun
off into their own company. The TV is sold. The
power generation business gone. He said, from
now on, we are going to be a telecommunications
company, period. That is terrifying to give up
these stable hundred year old industries like
rubber and power generation to bet the entire
farm on. Cell phones, which were still a pretty
new thing. It was a total existential gamble.
But Olayla saw the next wave coming. He saw the
GSM revolution. Global system for mobile communications.
Right. Nokia had been one of the key developers
of the GSM standard. What made GSM so different
from the old analog systems like NMT? It was
digital. And that meant a few huge things. One,
much better voice quality and more security.
You couldn't just tune in with a radio scanner
and eavesdrop on calls anymore. But most importantly,
it was designed for data from the ground up.
It allowed for something revolutionary. SMS text
messaging. The first GSM call ever made was in
1991, wasn't it? Yeah. By the Finnish prime minister
at the time, Harry Holkery, using a Nokia prototype
phone on a network built with Nokia equipment.
Alila knew this standard was going to conquer
the world. And he was absolutely right. The financial
turnaround was just, it's insane. They went from
a huge operating loss in 1991. To making $4 billion
in operating profit by 1999. It's the hockey
stick growth curve that every Silicon Valley
startup dreams of. But this was a 100 -year -old
industrial giant from Finland doing it. A total
transformation. So let's talk about why they
won. Because in the 90s, it wasn't just them.
You had Motorola. You had Ericsson. Motorola
literally invented the portable cell phone. Why
did Nokia just blow past them? I think it came
down to a fundamental difference in philosophy.
Motorola was an engineering company. They built
radios for the police, for the military. Their
phones were designed as rugged, functional tools
for business. Utilitarian. Very. Nokia, and maybe
this comes from their background in consumer
electronics with the TVs, they understood something
profound. They understood that a phone wasn't
just a tool. It was a lifestyle device. They
went after the youth market. Exactly. Think of
the phones. The Nokia 5110. The 3210. These weren't
boring gray business phones. They were fun, and
they had the killer feature, Express On Coverage.
Oh, absolutely. I had a metallic blue one for
my 5110. My friend had one with a flame pattern.
It sounds so silly now, but being able to change
the color of your phone was mind -blowing at
the time. It was genius. It turned a piece of
technology into a fashion accessory. You could
match it to your outfit. It made the phone personal,
an expression of your identity. Motorola didn't
get that. Ericsson didn't get that. And then,
of course, the software. the usability was just
on another level the navi key interface that
one big button that let you do almost everything
it was so intuitive my grandmother could use
a nokia she couldn't get her head around a motorola
start and lawn snake we cannot overstate the
importance of the game snake it was a killer
app So by 1998, They do it. They overtake Motorola
to become the best -selling mobile phone brand
in the entire world. And they manufactured their
100 millionth phone that same year in December
1998. And the economic impact on Finland. I mean,
it's hard for us to even comprehend in a country
the size of the U .S. It's almost impossible.
Imagine if Apple, Google, and Microsoft were
all one single company, and that company was
based in a country the size of, say, Minnesota.
Okay. By the year 2000, Nokia alone accounted
for 4 % of Finland's entire gross domestic product.
4 % of the whole economy. From one company. That
is staggering. And 21 % of their total exports.
A fifth. One fifth of everything Finland sold
to the rest of the world came from this one company.
They literally called it the Nokia miracle. It
lifted the entire country out of that post -Soviet
depression. And they were still innovating. I
think we forget this part because of how the
story ends. But in the early 2000s, they were
pushing boundaries that nobody else was even
touching. Oh, they were way ahead. The Nokia
7650. That was the first mass market phone with
a built -in camera. The very concept of taking
a photo and instantly being able to send it to
someone. Nokia did that first. The N series phones
were incredible. The N95. It launched in late
2006, just before the iPhone. And people forget
what a beast that thing was. It had GPS. It had
Wi -Fi, a 5 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss
lens, which was unheard of. It had a proper web
browser, 3G support. It was a multimedia computer,
as they called it. It was a smartphone. It just
didn't have a capacitive touchscreen. And then
there was the N -Gage. Ah, the... It really did
look like a taco when you held it up to your
head to talk. It was an unmitigated commercial
disaster, but you have to respect the ambition
they were trying to take on Nintendo and the
Game Boy Advance. Right. The head of entertainment
at Nokia, Ilka Reiskanen, he famously said, Game
Boy is for 10 -year -olds. The implication being
that the N -Gage was for cool, mature, sophisticated
gamers? It failed so miserably. it was a mess
the buttons were mushy it wasn't comfortable
to hold and to change the game cartridge you
had to turn off the phone take the back cover
off and remove the battery what a design flaw
a catastrophic one but it showed their mindset
at the time they thought they were invincible
they thought they could conquer any market gaming
included just by showing up with the nokia brand
on a product and honestly If you look at the
numbers in 2007, you can see why they were so
arrogant. You really can. In the fourth quarter
of 2007, Nokia's global market share for mobile
phones peaked. At 40 .4%. That's just dominance.
That's nearly half of all the phones sold on
the entire planet. If you walked into a room
of 10 people... Four of them had a Nokia in their
pocket. And that is the precise moment at the
absolute peak of their power that the ground
started to crumble beneath their feet. The burning
platform. Exactly. But before the famous memo,
there was the device. January 2007, Steve Jobs
walks on stage in San Francisco. And introduces
the iPhone. And the standard narrative we all
know is, iPhone arrives, Nokia dies immediately.
But that's not actually what the data shows,
is it? No, it's a simplification. In terms of
sheer volume, Nokia had their best sales years
after the iPhone launched. 2008 and 2009 were
still huge for them, especially in developing
markets. The rot was internal. It wasn't just
that the iPhone was cooler. No, it was that Nokia's
entire foundation was rotten. Okay, let's get
a bit technical here. Why couldn't they just
make a touchscreen phone to compete? They had
the engineers, they had the money. They did,
but they had the wrong operating system. They
were all in on Symbian. Okay, so explain Symbian.
What was the problem? Symbian was a marvel of
engineering for its time. It was designed in
the 90s for devices with very limited memory
and very slow processors. To do that, it had
to be hyper -efficient. But that made the code
incredibly complex. Incredibly. As phones got
more powerful, Nokia just kept piling more features
and more code on top of this aging, intricate
foundation. It became spaghetti code. The worst
kind. By 2010, Symbian was millions and millions
of lines of code. To add a simple new feature
or to completely change the user interface to
work well with a touchscreen was a developer's
nightmare. I read some accounts from engineers
who worked there at the time. They said the compile
time. So the time it takes to turn the written
code into a working program you can test. It
was up to 48 hours. Wait. So if I'm a developer
and I think I fixed a bug, I have to wait two
full days to find out if my fix actually worked.
In some cases, yes. Meanwhile, over at Apple,
an iOS engineer could iterate on their code in
minutes. You simply cannot compete with that
speed. Symbian was a burning platform because
it was structurally incapable of evolving fast
enough to catch iOS or Android. And corporate
culture had changed, too. It wasn't the nimble
innovator anymore. It had become a bloated bureaucracy.
Former employees described it as Soviet -style.
You had these powerful middle managers fighting
each other over resources. If your team had a
great idea for a touch interface, the team in
charge of the button interface would try to kill
it because it threatened their jobs and their
bonuses. So they were fighting themselves instead
of the competition. They were paralyzed by their
own success. So 2010 rolls around. The situation
is looking shaky. The board makes a big move.
They hire Stephen Elop. The first non -Finnish
CEO in the company's history. And he comes from
Microsoft. And soon after he arrives, he sends
one of the most famous internal memos in corporate
history. The burning platform. He tells this
story, this parable, about a man working on an
oil rig in the North Sea. Right. An explosion
wakes him up. He runs to the edge of the platform.
Behind him is a wall of fire. Below him is the
dark, freezing cold ocean. And he has a choice.
Stay on the platform and die in the fire or jump
into the icy water and maybe survive. He jumps.
And Elop was telling his employees, Symbian is
the burning platform. If we stay on it, we will
die. We have to jump. And the jump he chose for
them was Windows Phone. This is the moment. The
decision that business historians will argue
about forever. It's the great pivot. And Nokia
really had three options at that point. Option
one, try to fix Symbian, which, as we said, was
basically impossible. Right. Option two, go with
Android, like Samsung, HTC, and Motorola were
all doing. And option three, partner with Microsoft
on their new Windows Phone OS. So why didn't
they choose Android? In hindsight, it seems like
such an obvious move. Android was free. It was
gaining traction. It was getting the apps. Elop's
public argument was about differentiation. He
believed that if Nokia used Android, they would
just become one of many manufacturers making
black rectangles. A commodity hardware maker.
Exactly. He worried they'd be fighting Samsung
and others on price with razor thin margins and
that Google would end up capturing all the value
from the software and services, not Nokia. So
he wanted to be the big fish in it. new smaller
pond. He wanted to create a third ecosystem to
challenge the duopoly of Apple and Google. And
Microsoft was desperate for a major hardware
partner. They threw billions of dollars in marketing
support at Nokia. So Elop made the call. They
jumped to Windows. And then came the tactical
error. The Osborne effect. This was the killer.
Elop announced the switch to Windows Phone in
February of 2011. He effectively stood up and
told the whole world Symbian is dead. But the
first Nokia Windows Phone wasn't ready yet. it
wouldn't be ready to ship for another nine months.
So he told consumers, don't buy our current phones,
they're obsolete. Yeah. But he had no new phones
to sell them. Exactly. Sales of Symbian phones
didn't just decline. They completely collapsed
overnight. Revenue fell off a cliff. The company
started burning through its massive cash reserves
just trying to keep the lights on. The stock
price tanked, falling below $2 a share by mid
-2012. And when the new Lumia phones finally
did arrive... They were beautiful. I will die
on this hill. The hardware was stunning. The
Lumia 800 with its polycarbonate unibody. The
Lumia 920 with its optical image stabilizer.
The colors, the bright yellow and cyan. And the
cameras were incredible. The Lumia 1020 had a
41 megapixel sensor in 2013. It was years and
I mean years ahead of Apple and Samsung in photography.
But the app gap. It was real and it was fatal.
Developers didn't want to build for a third ecosystem
with a tiny market share. So you had Instagram
on iPhone. You had it on Android. For the longest
time, you didn't have it on Windows Phone. A
customer would walk into a store, fall in love
with the Nokia hardware, ask does it have Snapchat,
hear the word no, and walk out with a Samsung
Galaxy. It was a death by a thousand cuts, which
leads to the inevitable. 2013, Nokia sells its
phone business. To Microsoft. for 5 .44 billion
euros. The chairman at the time, Risto Sulasma,
had this heartbreaking quote. He called the decision...
Rationally correct, but emotionally difficult.
For Finland, it was a national trauma. The pride
of the nation, the brand that put them on the
global map, was being sold off to an American
tech giant. Microsoft took over the factories,
the designers, the Lumia brand name. It felt
like the end. But, and this is the big pivot,
the reason we're doing this deep dive, that wasn't
the end of Nokia. No, this is the part most people
completely missed. When they sold the devices
and services division, they didn't sell the whole
company. They kept three key assets. Okay, let's
list them. What was left? Number one, Nokia Networks.
This was their big, boring, but profitable infrastructure
business. The cell towers, the network switches,
all the back -end gear that makes mobile networks
run. Number two, here, Maps. This was their world
-class digital mapping division. For in -car
navigation, it was actually better than Google
Maps in many ways at the time. And number three,
Nokia Technologies, which was basically their
treasure chest of patents. Decades of R &D. Thousands
upon thousands of essential patents for mobile
communication. So even if you buy a Samsung or
an Apple phone today. A tiny slice of that money
is still going to Nokia in royalties. Essentially,
yes. So they had these three pieces. They made
a quick strategic decision to sell the maps division.
They sold here maps to a consortium of German
car makers, Audi, BMW, Daimler for 2 .8 billion
euros. So they cashed that out? Cashed it out.
So now they're sitting on a huge pile of hash
from the Microsoft deal and the German car guys
deal. What do they do with it? They double down
on being the plumbers of the Internet. That's
the perfect way to put it. In 2015, they made
a massive acquisition. They bought their French
-American rival, Alcatel -Lucent, for 15 .6 billion
euros. That's a huge deal. That's almost three
times what they got for the phone business. It
was transformative. And it brought two absolute
jewels into the Nokia crown. First, and maybe
most importantly, Bell Labs. The Bell Labs. As
in New Jersey, the invention of the transistor,
the laser, the solar cell, Bell Labs. The very
same. One of the most legendary research and
development centers in the history of science.
That is now a Nokia Research Center. It gave
them immense R &D credibility and a pipeline
of future tech. That's incredible. And the second
jewel. Submarine cables. Alcatel had a division.
called Alcatel Submarine Networks, or ASN. This
is a part of the internet we never think about.
We talk about the cloud, but the cloud is actually
at the bottom of the ocean. It is. 99 % of all
international data traffic travels through these
undersea fiber optic cables, not satellites.
And Nokia, through this acquisition, now owns
a fleet of cable -laying ships. I looked these
up. The C .S. Aldousan. The C .S. Aldousan. These
are massive high -tech vessels. They're floating
factories. They sail out into the middle of the
Atlantic or the Pacific, spooling out thousands
of miles of fiber optic cable, thinner than a
human hair, onto the ocean floor. They have these
underwater plows to bury the cable so fishing
nets don't snag it. They have robot submarines
to go down and fix breaks. So while we were all
mourning the loss of our unbreakable brick phones,
Nokia was... busy literally wiring the planet
together. They completely shifted their focus
from the device in your hand to the invisible
network that makes that device useful. If you're
listening to this deep dive right now, the data
packets carrying our voices probably traveled
through a Nokia -made switch or a Nokia -laid
cable at some point on their journey to you.
But they did have a weird little identity crisis
for a bit there, didn't they? Do you remember
the OZO camera? Oh, the VR camera. The big black
ball that looked like a probe droid from the
Empire Spikes back. That was 2015. VR was supposed
to be the next big thing. And Nokia jumped in
with this professional -grade 360 -degree camera.
It cost $60 ,000. $60 ,000. Who was buying that?
Disney bought some major movie studios. But the
consumer VR revolution didn't really happen,
at least not as fast as everyone thought. So
Nokia killed the whole product line in 2017.
They also bought that digital health company,
Withings. They did in 2016. They made those smart
scales and watches. I actually have a Withings
scale. I had no idea it was owned by Nokia for
a while. It was branded Nokia Digital Health
for about two years. And then they seemed to
realize, you know what? We're a business to business
company now. We're not good at consumer marketing
anymore. So they sold it back to the original
founder of Withings in 2018. Yeah. Which feels
like a very mature, disciplined decision. We
tried it. It didn't fit our core mission. Let's
cut our losses and move on. It's very different
from the Kyra Moe era in the 80s where they tried
to do everything at once. The modern Nokia is
very quick to kill things that don't fit the
core strategy. Except. I can still walk into
a Best Buy today and see a Nokia phone on the
shelf. I saw a rugged Nokia smartphone last week,
so explain that. That is a clever bit of branding,
sleight of hand. That is a company called HMD
Global. Okay. Who are they? In 2016, the new,
focused Nokia realized that the brand name itself
still had a lot of value and nostalgia attached
to it, even if they themselves didn't want to
be in the risky business of manufacturing phones.
Right. So a new, separate company was formed
in Finland called HMD Global. It was run mostly
by former Nokia executives who had left during
the Microsoft years. So the band got back together.
Sort of. Kind of. And HMD cut a deal. They licensed
the Nokia brand name. They designed the phones.
But the actual manufacturing is done by Foxconn,
the same company that makes iPhones. It's a smart
asset -light model. Nokia gets paid a royalty
for the use of its name, but takes zero risk
on inventory or factories. Exactly. And HMD has
played the nostalgia card perfectly. One of the
first things they did was re -release an updated
version of the 3310. I remember that. They also
re -released the 8110, the banana phone from
the Matrix. It got them tons of headlines. But
alongside that, they also make solid, no -nonsense
Android smartphones that get good reviews for
their clean software. So the brand we knew lives
on in our pockets as a kind of ghost, an Echo.
But the real Nokia, the corporation, is doing
something very different in the 2020s. They are
now strictly a business to business or B2B company.
They're the world's third largest network equipment
manufacturer, right up there with their old rival
Ericsson and the Chinese giant Huawei. And geopolitics
is helping them again, isn't it? Just like in
the Cold War, international politics is shaping
their profit margins. It's amazing how history
repeats itself. When the U .S. government and
other Western nations started banning Huawei
and ZTE from their 5G networks due to national
security concerns. There were only two major
non -Chinese suppliers left. Nokia and Ericsson.
Suddenly, if you're a carrier like AT &T or Verizon
in the U .S. or a carrier in the U .K. or Australia,
and you need to build out your 5G network and
you're forbidden from using the Chinese gear,
you call the Finns or the Swedes. Nokia became
the safe. geopolitical choice for the West. A
trusted partner. It's been a huge boost for their
business. And now they're looking beyond Earth
entirely. We tease this at the very beginning.
The moon. This is my favorite part of the modern
Nokia story. In 2020, NASA awarded Nokia a $14
.1 million contract as part of its Tipping Point
technology program. To build a 4G network on
the moon. My first question is, why? Why do astronauts
need LTE? It's not so they can check Instagram
from the lunar surface. No, it's all about creating
reliable communications infrastructure for the
Artemis missions. Right now, when a lunar rover
talks to the lander or the lander talks back
to Earth, it's all point -to -point radio, it
uses a lot of power, and the bandwidth is relatively
low. So if you want to send back high -definition
video of a moonwalk or control a robot arm in
real time, traditional radio is a bottleneck.
Exactly. A 4G LTE network is incredibly efficient.
It provides high bandwidth and low latency over
long distances with very compact, low power hardware.
Nokia is essentially building a network in a
box. The base station gets mounted on the side
of the lunar lander, and then the rovers and
the astronauts gear can connect to it just like
your phone connects to a cell tower. What are
the technical challenges there? I have to imagine
the moon is a slightly harsher environment than
downtown Helsinki. Just a bit. You have extreme
cosmic radiation that can fry electronics. You
have temperatures that swing hundreds of degrees
from boiling hot in the sun to cryogenically
cold in the shade. And you have the intense vibration
and shock of a rocket launch and landing. The
hardware has to be, well, Nokia tough. Bomb proof.
If they pull this off, and the mission is expected
to deploy fully this year or next, It's a massive
technological flex. It's the ultimate marketing
campaign. It proves to the world that their technology
is robust enough for space exploration, which
means it's definitely robust enough for a factory
floor or a shipping port on Earth. Okay, let's
bring it right up to the present day. February
2026. The company looks very different. Even
than it did just five years ago. They went through
a huge rebrand in 2023. The logo changed. Remember
the controversy online? They ditched that classic
familiar Yale blue type face that we all knew
from the phones. And they replaced it with this
jagged, abstract, very modern looking logo. Some
of the letters have strokes missing. It's very
stylized. People hated it at first. Of course
they did. People always hate change. But the
message behind it was strategically brilliant.
They were shouting from the rooftops. We are
not the phone company. We are a B2B deep tech
innovation company. The old logo was consumer
friendly. The new logo is enterprise focused.
And the leadership has shifted. Pekka Ludmark
was the CEO who steered them through that tough
restructuring in the early 2020s. But as of last
year, there's a new face at the top. Justin Hotard.
He was announced as the new CEO in February 2025
and officially took the reins in March. So he's
been in the job for almost a full year now. And
his background tells you everything you need
to know about where Nokia is heading. He didn't
come from telecom. He came from HP Enterprise.
His background is in high performance computing
and artificial intelligence. So Nokia isn't just
about. connecting people anymore. It's about
connecting massive AI data centers. Precisely.
Just look at their recent strategic moves. In
June of 2024, they acquired a company called
Infinera for $2 .3 billion. What do they do?
They're a leader in optical networking. Basically,
they make the hardware that makes fiber optic
pipes faster, more efficient. And then in late
2025, they announced a major partnership with
Supermicro. Who are big in the AI server space.
So Nokia is betting their future on the idea
that the AI boom is going to require a massive
upgrade to the underlying data movement infrastructure
of the Internet. And they want to be the ones
selling the picks and shovels for that gold rush.
It's the same logic as the 19th century. Back
then, they provided the power and the cables
for the first industrial revolution. Now they're
providing the bandwidth and the optical systems
for the AI revolution. And to bring things full
circle. They had to exit Russia completely in
2022. It's a sad closing of a circle. It really
is. The company that grew fat and powerful on
Soviet trade in the 70s and 80s had to completely
sever those ties after the invasion of Ukraine.
They dismantled their networks there and left
the country for good. It shows how much the world
has changed and how Nokia has had to change with
it. OK, so let's try to synthesize this whole
epic journey. We've gone from a pulp mill in
the Russian Empire to a 4G base station on the
moon in 2026. What is the ultimate takeaway here?
For me, the takeaway is that Nokia is a lesson
in the brutal, painful necessity of letting go.
Letting go of the thing that made you famous
and successful. Exactly. Most great companies
die because they hug their cash cow to death
long after it stopped. giving milk. Kodak couldn't
let go of photographic film. Blockbuster couldn't
let go of physical video rentals. And Nokia was
the absolute king of mobile phones. It was their
entire identity. For Finland, it was their national
pride. And they let it burn. They accepted that
the platform was on fire and they made the jump.
They gave up the consumer glory and the brand
recognition to survive in the boring, invisible
world of infrastructure. They prove that a brand
can effectively die in the consumer's hand, but
thrive in the unseen machinery of the world.
They are the invisible giants now. And it was
the right move. I think it's undeniable. If they
hadn't sold the phone division to Microsoft when
they did, they would almost certainly be bankrupt
today. Instead, they are profitable, they own
Bell Labs, and they're putting a network on the
moon. Before we wrap up, I want to leave our
listeners with a final thought experiment. A
big what if. Go for it. If Nokia... Back in 2011,
under Steven Elop, had made a different choice.
They had chosen Android instead of Windows Phone.
Would we all be carrying Nokia devices today?
It's the great counterfactual of the mobile industry.
Would Samsung just be a minor player in the phone
market? Would Nokia have used its superior hardware
engineering and brand loyalty to become the undisputed
king of the Android world? Or... Was their transition
into becoming the plumbers of the internet the
only way they could have truly survived the smartphone
wars? It's a tough one. My personal take. If
they'd gone with Android, they'd be fighting
a brutal Lomregen war with Samsung and a dozen
Chinese manufacturers today. They might still
exist as a phone brand, but they would have been
a shadow of their former selves. I don't think
they would have had the capital or the focus
to buy Alcatel -Lucent, to own Bell Labs, or
to go to the moon. So the jump into the icy water
was the right call? I think the jump into the
icy water, the painful, humiliating sale to Microsoft,
was the move that actually saved the organism.
in the long run. A truly fascinating history,
from the riverbanks of Tampere to the craters
of the moon. Thank you for walking us through
this. My pleasure. It's an incredible story.
And to our listener, thanks for spending your
Valentine Saturday with us. Keep connecting people,
however you choose to do it. We'll see you in
the next Deep Dive.