Nokia (NOKIA.HE) unveiled plans on Sunday to change its brand identity for the first time in nearly six decades, complete with a new logo, as the telecom equipment maker centres on aggressive growth.
The new logo contains five different shapes making the word NOKIA. The iconic blue color of the old logo has been dropped for a variety of colors depending on the use.
“There was the association to smartphones and nowadays we are a business technology company,” Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark told Reuters in an interview.
He was speaking before a business update by the company on the eve of the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) which opens in Barcelona on Monday and continues until March 2.
After taking over the top position at the struggling Finnish firm in 2020, Lundmark laid out a strategy with three stages: reset, accelerate, and scale. With the reset stage now finished, Lundmark said the second stage is starting.
While Nokia still aims to expand its service provider business, where it supplies equipment to telecom firms, its key focus is now to supply gear to other businesses.
“We had very good 21% growth last year in enterprise, which is currently about 8% of our sales, (or) 2 billion euros ($2.11 billion) roughly,” Lundmark said. “We want to take that to double digits as quickly as possible.”
Big technology firms have been teaming up with telecom gear makers such as Nokia to sell private 5G networks and gears for automated factories to customers, especially in the manufacturing sector.
Nokia plans to analyze the growth path of its different businesses and explore alternatives, including divestment.
“The signal is very clear. We only want to be in businesses where we can see global leadership,” Lundmark said.
Nokia’s move toward factory automation and datacentres will also see them competing with big tech firms, such as Amazon (AMZN.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O).
Buy Crypto Now“There will be multiple different types of cases, sometimes they will be our partners … sometimes they can be our customers… and I am sure that there will also be situations where they will be competitors.”
The market to sell telecom gear is facing pressure with macro environment softening demand from high-margin markets such as North America, being replaced by a rise in low-margin India, pushing rival Ericsson to cut 8,500 employees.
“India is our fastest growing market that has lower margins – this is a structural change,” Lundmark said, adding that Nokia expects North America to be stronger in the back half of 2023.
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