Finnish telecom major Nokia has announced on Sunday to change its brand identity which includes a makeover of its logo.
The new logo, which features the word NOKIA in five different shapes, is a sign that Nokia, which sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft in 2014, will no longer make mobile phones.
"This is @Nokia but not as the world has seen us before. Our new brand signals our ambition to harness the exponential potential of networks, drive digitalization across every industry," Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark tweeted.
"There was the association to smartphones and nowadays we are a business technology company," Lundmark told Reuters. He was speaking ahead of a business update by the company on the eve of the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) which opens in Barcelona on Monday and runs until March 2.
After taking over the top job at the struggling telecom equipment company in 2020, Lundmark set out a strategy with three stages: reset, accelerate and scale. With the reset stage now complete, Lundmark said the second stage is beginning. While Nokia still aims to grow its service provider business, where it sells equipment to telecom companies, its main focus is now to sell gear to other businesses.
This is for the first time in 60 years, Nokia is gearing up for such major changes, including a new logo. “We want to launch a new brand that is focusing very much on the networks and industrial digitalization, which is a completely different thing from the legacy mobile phones,” Lundmark told Bloomberg
Major technology firms have been partnering with telecom gear makers such as Nokia to sell private 5G networks and gears for automated factories to customers, mostly in the manufacturing sector.Nokia plans to review the growth path of its different businesses and consider alternatives, including divestment."The signal is very clear. We only want to be in businesses where we can see global leadership," Lundmark told Reuters.
Once upon a time mobile handsets meant Nokia. HMD Global, a company founded by former Nokia employees, is now manufacturing Nokia phones.
Nokia's main source of revenue is the sale of networking equipment and the licensing of several patents related to mobile manufacturing. The ban imposed by many countries on 5G devices made by
Chinese rival Huawei alleging that the company's products may purposely contain security holes gave fresh opportunity for Nokia.
