Nokia Changes Iconic Logo to Signal Strategy Shift

Barcelona: Nokia (NOKIA.HE) on Sunday announced plans to change its brand identity with a new logo for the first time in nearly 60 years, as the telecom equipment maker focuses on aggressive growth.

The new logo includes five different shapes that form the word NOKIA. The iconic blue color of the old logo has been dropped for a range of colors depending on usage.

“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 ahead of a business update by the company on the eve of the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC), which begins in Barcelona on Monday and will go on till March 2.

After taking over the top position at the struggling Finnish company in 2020, Lundmark laid out a strategy with three phases: reset, accelerate and scale. With the reset phase now complete, Lundmark said the second phase is beginning. While Nokia still aims to grow its service provider business, where it sells equipment to telecommunications companies, its main focus is now on selling 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 are partnering with telecom gear makers such as Nokia to sell gear for private 5G networks and automated factories to customers, mostly in manufacturing. Nokia plans to review the growth trajectory of its various businesses and consider options including disinvestment.

“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).

“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 telecoms gear is under pressure from the macro environment Demand from high-margin markets such as North America is being replaced by growth in lower-margin India, causing rival Ericsson to lay off 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 second half of the year.