Nokia refreshes its branding, emphasizing collaboration
BARCELONA—One of the most venerable telecom brands is remaking itself. Nokia unveiled a new logo that its executives say is part of its strategy to grow its enterprise customer base.
“A significant part of the world sees us as a consumer brand,” Nokia President and CEO Pekka Lundmark explained at a press event on Sunday afternoon, just before the start of Mobile World Congress 2023. As the company enters what Chief Strategy and Technology Officer Nishant Batra called “the new age of digitalization,” Nokia laid out both the new look for the brand and its strategy to move ahead.
That included six pillars on which Nokia is building its business: To grow its service provider networks business faster than the 1% per-year growth expected for the overall market; expand its share of the enterprise market, which is growing at a far faster rate; to actively manage its portfolio so that it is a leader in the segments where it chooses to compete; to continue bolstering its intellectual property position and invest in the long-term, including in future 6G technologies; to build new business models focused on “extreme consumability,” as Lundmark put it; and to make its ESG work into a competitive advantage.
Nokia is already seeing success in the enterprise networks space, Lundmark said, noting the hundreds of private networks that it has already delivered. “The numbers that we have delivered are starting to speak for themselves,” he said. “We had 21% growth in enterprise last year, and it actually accelerated toward the end of the year. It was 49% in the fourth quarter. … It’s about technology investment, making the product suitable for enterprise use, bringing things like core-as-a-service [and making them] extremely easy and simple to use,” Lundmark continued. “But it’s not only about technology, it’s also about go-to-market. And the most important thing there is the partner network that we are building. We have, already, around 140 go-to-market partners for … wide-area private wireless networks and about 180 for campus environments. This is really significant, because there’s millions and millions of these campuses out there. So this is how we will scale.”
Lundmark added that while it is still early days, “the really promising thing is that we are starting to see traction from many of these partners.” He noted that on Tuesday of Mobile World Congress Barcelona, he will be sharing a stage with Kyndryl; the two companies announced a newly extended three-year partnership earlier this month focused on co-development for private LTE and 5G networks and Industry 4.0.
Nokia, Lundmark said, is a very well-known brand around the global, “but it is very much still recognized as a consumer brand. We had to reposition ourselves as a B2B technology brand because operators know us well. But this wide world of enterprises, the 50 million industrial campuses, they do not know who we are.” The new Nokia logo — made up of sharp, stylized letters that are only recognizable as “Nokia” when they are placed together, to emphasize collaboration — is one of the enablers that Nokia hopes will help it continue to make inroads with enterprise customers.
