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.
Sam Vaknin ( samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After
the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for
Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and
eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business
Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe
categories in The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of
Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at samvak.tripod.com
