As the telecom equipment maker focuses on aggressive growth, Nokia (NOKIA.HE) announced plans on Sunday to change its brand identity for the first time in nearly 60 years, complete with a new logo.
The new logo is made up of five different shapes that form the word NOKIA. The old logo’s iconic blue colour has been replaced with a variety of colours depending on the application.
“There was the association to smartphones, and now we are a business technology company,” said CEO Pekka Lundmark in an interview with Reuters.
He was speaking ahead of the company’s business update on the eve of the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC), which begins Monday in Barcelona and runs until March 2.
After taking over the top job at the struggling Finnish company in 2020, Lundmark set out a strategy with three stages: reset, accelerate and scale. With the reset stage now complete, Lundmark said the second stage is beginning.
While Nokia still aims to grow its service provider business, where it sells equipment to telecom companies, its main focus is now to sell 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.”
Major technology firms have been partnering with telecom gear makers such as Nokia to sell private 5G networks and gears for automated factories to customers, mostly in the manufacturing sector.
Nokia plans to review the growth path of its different businesses and consider 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 locking horns with big tech companies, such as Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Amazon (AMZN.O).