Nokia Phones: from a Total Success to a Total Fiasco
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Portland State University PDXScholar Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations Engineering and Technology Management 10-8-2018 Nokia Phones: From a Total Success to a Total Fiasco Ahmed Alibage Portland State University Charles Weber Portland State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/etm_fac Part of the Engineering Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details A. Alibage and C. Weber, "Nokia Phones: From a Total Success to a Total Fiasco: A Study on Why Nokia Eventually Failed to Connect People, and an Analysis of What the New Home of Nokia Phones Must Do to Succeed," 2018 Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), Honolulu, HI, 2018, pp. 1-15. This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Engineering and Technology Management Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. 2018 Proceedings of PICMET '18: Technology Management for Interconnected World Nokia Phones: From a Total Success to a Total Fiasco A Study on Why Nokia Eventually Failed to Connect People, and an Analysis of What the New Home of Nokia Phones Must Do to Succeed Ahmed Alibage, Charles Weber Dept. of Engineering and Technology Management, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, USA Abstract—This research intensively reviews and analyzes the management made various strategic changes to take the strategic management of technology at Nokia Corporation. Using company back into its leading position, or at least into a traditional narrative literature review and secondary sources, we position that compensates or reduces the losses incurred since reviewed and analyzed the historical transformation of Nokia’s then. These strategic changes included the replacement of the core business, leadership strategies, business architecture, R&D CEO in 2010 to deploy new strategies. Nonetheless, Nokia’s policy, innovation strategy, product lunch, and smartphones recognition and demonstration. We identified various strategic deterioration was consistent, year after year [3, 4, 6, 7]. gaps that the previous analytical studies seemingly have missed to According to [3], Nokia’s market capitalization dropped from identify and generalize. Therefore, we add to the literature a 110 to 15 billion euros in 2012, which led the company to close bundle of the lessons learned that chronologically explain how various factories and R&D facilities, in addition to laying off Nokia failed to create and sustain competitive advantages, many of its employees. Further, in September 2013, Microsoft particularly in the smartphone market. We concluded that the officially announced the purchase of Nokia’s business unit of problem at Nokia was not the lack of innovation, but rather, it devices and services for 3.79 billion euros [3, 4] and patent was the lack of a precise technology forecasting, and license for 1.65 billion euros [8]. However, Microsoft as well misunderstanding that the needs in smartphone market were not couldn’t make any success in the space of smartphone market, just about demonstrating a mobile phone that makes calls, texts and connects to the web, but also the platform that operates all and later in May 2016, the feature phone assets were sold to these functions together. Since Nokia’s brand name is recently FIH Mobile Ltd., a subsidiary of Taiwanese firm Foxconn back in the market through a newly licensed firm (HMD Global), Technology and a newly-established firm HMD Global for we further discuss how likely the new Nokia’s smartphones will $350 million [9, 10]. To this end, this research aims to answer possibly compete and plausibly succeed in a very well-established the following questions; market. 1. What are the strategic gaps at Nokia Corporation that I. INTRODUCTION led to its collapse, particularly in the smartphone market, despite it was one of the world’s great corporate Peter Drucker urges that the mission statement of any success stories? business is what defines the starting point of its strategies and plans [1]. The mission statement of Nokia was simple and 2. How likely is the new home of Nokia phones, namely straightforward; “Connecting People” [2, p. 10]. Nokia was (HMD Global) would succeed in the smartphone focused on building its brand worldwide and achieving the market? credibility and market leading, which it once had. In 1994, the In this research, we intend to present that the story of a company successfully made the shift from a Finnish company significantly successful business may end up in a total fiasco, to a global payer and became during the 1990s and early 2000s particularly when the strategies and plans deviate from the one of the world largest mobile phone firms in terms of business mission and objectives. The business eventually fails volume, sales, market share and profit [3]. The introduction of regardless of how high its market share or how superior its its first smartphone N95 and the Symbian OS in Spring 2007 leading position when the leadership fails to forecast the right has fostered the company leading position proved by the jump time of the technology to market, and underestimates and/or of its overall market share from 36% in 2006 to 38% in 2007 misunderstand the total capabilities of the rivals, the market [4]. In fact, Nokia made another dominance, particularly in size and demand, the customer wants and needs, and the smartphones industry with a market share of 70% in 2007 [3], industry eco-system. Although the failure of a company such as leaving its competitor far behind. However, Nokia’s story of Nokia was too painful and extremely expensive yet, it can be success started to fade away shortly after the introduction of the the perfect lessons learned to rethink the strategies for creating, Apple iPhone in the third quarter of 2007 [4] and the achieving and sustain competitive advantages. breakthrough Human-Computer Interaction HCI, which set the standards for the user experience [3]. Although the overall II. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY market share reached 39% in 2008 [4] yet, all the financial figures of Nokia started to decline. For instance, net sales Our interest is to acquire a wider and deeper understanding dropped by (-1%), operating profit by (-38%), and profit of why and how successful high-tech firms fail to create and attributable to equity holders by (-45%) [5]. As a result, senior sustain competitive advantages. We choose Nokia as a renowned story of success and a market leader for more than a 978-1-890843-37-3 ©2018 PICMET decade, but eventually suffered a persistent declination until it However, Nokia’s success did not last longer than 2007, as the has completely failed to compete in the smartphone market. company went through a journey of a persistent declination of Therefore, we follow a historical posture in solving issues and its financial performance as illustrated in figure 1 below [4]. interpreting ambiguities by collecting evidences that produce a comprehension of the processes, mechanisms, and outcomes. Our goal is to conduct a rigorous examination of the relevant data (desk-research or secondary sources) using traditional narrative literature review to summarizes the available body of literature and draws conclusions regarding the issue in question. This type of literature review is used to provide a comprehensive background for understanding the current knowledge of the problem and highlighting the implications of new research. We started gathering data from multiple sources by looking for information regarding the social, economic and industrial history of Nokia between the late of the 1970s and the present. The information was gathered focusing on Nokia’s history, including published academic research, magazine and Figure 1 - Key data of Nokia mobile phones business unit – Source [4] journal articles, conferences preceding, as well as the firm’s According to [16], Nokia’s collapse from the top of the official history and annual reports. Moreover, we considered smartphone pyramid is due to three factors; (1) less technical the use of the available statistical data and logical reasoning to capabilities compared with the rivals’ (e.g. Apple), (2) high cope with the potential subjectivity of the qualitative analysis level of complacency, and (3) failure of the leadership to see of the previous studies. The review comprises Nokia’s the upcoming disruption, particularly Apple’s iPhone. Another successive leaderships and strategic changes, business perspective views the factors to failure were; (1) the inability of architecture, R&D policy, innovation strategy, products’ lunch, the executives to grasp the market accurately, (2) deviation in and smartphones’ recognition. In the final analysis, we the business tactics, and (3) lack of teamwork [8]. However, to employed multiple data sources to understand; (a) how Nokia identify and define the gaps in Nokia’s previous strategies that has transformed its business model and greatly succeeded led to its disappearance from the mobile phone industry, during the1990s and early 2000s, and (b) how its story of multiple aspects will be discussed in the following sections. success continued until it started to decline in 2008. Moreover, our review and analysis extend to further our understanding of how likely the new Nokia’s smartphones by the newly licensed IV. LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGIC CHANGES firm (HMD Global) possibly compete and plausibly succeed in For around eleven years (1977-1988), Kari Kairamo was a very well-established market. the CEO of Nokia. During his leadership, the company was transforming from a conglomerate to an internationally large III. COMPANY OVERVIEW multi-industry firm with an emphasis on telecommunication devices [3], mainly network equipment and digital switches for Nokia is Finnish multinational communications and IT the telephone exchange [13].