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It was the market-leader bigger then it's 2 closed competitors together(!), when Elop took over. Nokia was generating healthy profits and the profits where growing!

Now, a bit more then a year later, Nokia is down to its all time low, rated junk, generates billion $ loses, is down to way below 10% marketshare and is in deep cash problems.



No, it is a classic management failure. In our history there never ever was a company that lost so fast so much. No single company across ALL industries (not only mobile or tech) ever died that fast. This is a all-time world-record. You cannot reach that with doing nothing. You need to apply and execute a series of fatal actions to make that active happen.



Its not like they only moved there factories or development somewhere else. They did not. They closed factories, research and development WITHOUT any replacement.

Maybe its correct that today to continue to compete you need to produce in Asia like Apple does and like, btw, Nokia did with the Lumia too. The N9 was made in Finnland and sold, compared with the Lumia, which was made in cheap factories in Asia (resulting in the famous and ueber-expensive Lumia 900 bug), with profit for Nokia.

But they did not. They stopped research and development! As WinPhone reseller you may not need research and development but then you will stay a reseller and not more. That is what Nokia just did. They downgraded themself from the mobile market-leader to a mass-product (noone likes to buy) reseller in a little over a year under Elop's management!

Edited 2012-07-05 10:40 UTC

It was the "market leader" in number of shipped units... not that good with profit margins for quite some time, also when taking into account specific device segments of course (because it obviously doesn't make sense to compare S30 and iOS devices); insisting to look at some slice of a time period when profits were growing still didn't make their absolute value look good.

And a "market leader" in funds spent on R&D (and no, excluding the network division - looking only at consumer OS, handsets, services, and such), with horrible proportions of that amount to returns; suggesting highly dysfunctional structure that was around for a long time before Elop.

But yeah, blame Canada - or the Canadian, in this case... But seriously, it's not that Elop didn't make gross errors (for one, isn't "Eloped" the new & stronger variant of Osbourne effect?) or even pursued debatable goals (still, remember he would be specifically brought in to do them by the board, largest shareholders), and it's not that Nokia wasn't a major player (still is) - but this B&W narrative, as if Nokia wasn't in deep trouble prior to him, is getting old.
It was a long running management failure, at many levels (we know of few Nokia divisions essentially infighting each other, you think lowly employees weren't involved in pushing their pet darling to the detriment of other projects?)

(BTW those who predicted the downfall for a long time - there's for example Eldar Murtazin from mobile-review.com ...and notice, on the main page, that he doesn't have a problem with also calling Elop a traitor in his #176 EN editorial; didn't have a problem to praise some device from Nokia if it deserved it)


Right, as if Nokia didn't have their own activities in China... (that includes not only their own manufacturing - which can't be just moved so fast, so of course they'll depend on 3rd parties - but also quite sizeable, quite new R&D center - one which, IIRC, undergoes expansion recently)