Nokia – the new Ship of Theseus?

With around a million new Nokia 6 handsets getting sold in a minute after they got launched in China, we wonder – is the Finnish giant back? The smartphone company which had once engaged the world with its Symbian platform finally joined the Android bandwagon for good after years of running around like a headless chicken. But was it really the same old smartphone company? Since HMD Global bought exclusive rights to sell under the “Nokia” brand name, the brand Nokia which has exchanged a few hands over the past years is now set to be revived. However, this brings us to a few fundamental questions – what made Nokia Nokia? What constitutes a brand? Is the brand name enough for brand loyalists to buy irrespective of the company producing it? Or is it just an initial trigger which is later sustained by what the brand stands for?

Let’s go back to the 1860s to when the company was founded by a mining engineer near a small town called Nokia in Finland. For those of you who don’t know, Nokia started off as a wood pulp mill. It later added electricity generation to its business in the 1900s. The Nokia Corporation we know was founded in 1967 after a series of mergers and acquisitions and this was when the company ventured into electronics and telecommunication. Nokia entered the mobile phone market in the 2000s and was quick to revolutionise the industry with its Symbian OS series. However, with the advent of touch-based iPhones and the Android OS, it suddenly fizzled out unable to keep in touch with the new market. Microsoft buying the Nokia’s mobile division in the 2010s marked the demise of Symbian giving birth to a new generation of Windows Lumia phones which still couldn’t make a significant mark in the Android and iOS dominated market. Finally, in 2016, Microsoft sold off its feature phone assets to a subsidiary of Taiwanese firm Foxconn Technology and newly-established firm HMD Global for $350 million, bringing back “Nokia” phones to the market.

So, who is making the Nokia phones now? HMD owns the patent licenses and design rights. FIH mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn owns the rest of the business, including the factories. The brands, software and services, customer contracts and supply agreements are all under new management. Around 4,500 employees were given the opportunity to join either of the two companies. 

This highly successful flash sale of over a million Nokia 6 phones can be a very interesting topic of discussion for any marketing enthusiast. The initial high demand is due to heavy nostalgia of brand loyalists expecting the same quality and service that the Nokia brand offered. The responsibility of making this a sustainable model largely lies on the marketing team on finding out what exactly the brand stood for in the minds of customers and also, what the customers want now. For example, a Nokia android touch-screen smartphone will not be able to provide the same battery life with the same hardware nor be as robust as it was with the old feature phones. However, they have to be on the top of the game with these and hardware quality as that's what the 1 million people buying it under a minute expect. Will they live up to these expectations? Only time will tell. As for now, the ship of Nokia has been dismantled and remade under HMD Global and FIH mobile. The name “Nokia” still resonates with the people and the ship is set to sail.