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Comment by insane_dreamer | Hacker News Reader

> Nordic rival Nokia (NOKIA.HE) has not announced any plans to lay off employees.

This prompted me to think, is Nokia still around? Then I looked it up and:

> In 2020, Nokia employed approximately 92,000 people[6] across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and reported annual revenues of around €23 billion.[4]

Ok, that was surprising.

View on HN

The better known part of Nokia for most people was their mobile phone business, which was spun off and sold to Microsoft who then drove it into the ground, but the other parts of the company are still there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile

> drove it into the ground

If you mean they're not as prevalent as they were, sure I suppose. But they sold the business unit off again to HMD Global, who still make Nokia phones, such as the '3.4', the Android One (which is what led me to it - reasonably stock and years of updates - I previously had a Motorola for the same reason) device I'm typing this comment from.

> But they sold the business unit off again to HMD Global, who still make Nokia phones

They sold/licensed the brand. Apart from the name, there's nothing in common with the old Nokia.

I mean, that easily could've (and I'm sure was) said when Nokia sold their D&S division in the first place.

Does that make a difference? The brand was clearly the thing that most people cared about, hence why it's stuck around.

Nokia was already floundering in the consumer space; at least this way the name is still out there.

My understanding was they sold the branding to HMD Global who are still making Nokia branded smartphones, but also sold the actual feature phone business to Foxconn

Well this is a complete tangent, and I'm not at all claiming it's what I meant in GP, but increasingly I'm thinking (or realising) that 'a brand' is all a business is. So much is just the same crap minimally packaged, marked up, and branded to sell for as much as possible.

Even if you, as I do, buy decent traditionally marketed clothes made from natural fibers - the company selling them, unless it's an actual tailor you can literally take some cloth to, is nothing more than a brand on top of an Indian (say, probably - at least in my market) wholesale operation.

There is, because there are several former employees at the Finn offices of the new "Nokia" branded phones.

“Drove it into the ground” is, I think, unfair. The entire market was moving to Android and iOS. Microsoft and Nokia were late to the transition, tried to catch a section of the market, and failed. The succeeded in creating good products at the time, but having a good product is not enough, especially if you’re late to the market.

yeah I was a windows phone head. The Nokia Lumia 920 to this day is my favorite phone I've ever owned. But they just could not get any traction.

Same, the coolest phone I owned, and it was a joy to use. Even the un-official snapchat was miles ahead of the "real" one on Android.

I had one too; was a great phone even though I don’t care for windows

You need to search for "Operation Elop". There's a free e-book that details the whole thing to a striking degree (I was at Vodafone at the time, and... well... What I know confirms all of it).

"Operation Elop - The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones"

https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

Note - full book on medium - it makes my Firefox on Android cry...

> This page hosts various alternative formats of the Medium book Operation Elop which is an English translation of the original Finnish book Operaatio Elop. You can read the story of this translation project over at Nokia People, a forum for ex-Nokians. The English translation is made available for free, with the permission of the original authors, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

https://asokan.org/operation-elop/

We speculate that when Microsoft bought that part of Nokia, somewhere in the process the Sync.com domain name went up for auction (which appeared to be owned by Nokia just prior to the spin off).

As a startup trying to get going with Sync.Us, rebranding to https://www.sync.com really helped us take off.

Thanks to whomever auctioned that off :-)

Nokia's networking business was quite separate from the mobile phone business that got sold to Microsoft.

Its tire business as well.

And footwear company...

Seems Nokia read HN and have sorted out a rebrand to remove any confusion people have with the phone business: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/nokia-reveals-new-logo...

I lived next to a Nokia network engineer for several years. Lot's of activity in that space still.

they are still a big player in the telco equipment space. you'll find their hardware and/or software in most tower cabinets in the world

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