Nokia Devices and Services division

The story begins not with phones, but with paper. In 1865, mining engineer Fredrik Idestam established a pulp mill in Finland. Along with Leo Mechelin, he formed the Nokia Company in 1871, named after the Nokianvirta river. Through mergers with a rubber works and a cable company, Nokia Corporation was officially formed in 1967, producing everything from tires to televisions. In the 1980s, the company entered the nascent mobile phone industry. Nokia’s Devices and Services division became a titan. For a decade starting in 1998, it was the world's largest vendor of mobile phones. The company was celebrated for its durable hardware and user-friendly designs, making it a household name globally. However, the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the rise of Google's Android operating system marked a turning point. Nokia's reliance on its Symbian OS proved to be a strategic misstep as the market shifted towards app-centric ecosystems. In a bid to regain competitiveness, Nokia announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft in 2011, adopting Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform. This collaboration culminated in Microsoft announcing its acquisition of Nokia's Devices and Services business in September 2013 for over $7 billion. The deal, which included licensing Nokia's patents, was finalized in April 2014, with about 32,000 Nokia employees transferring to Microsoft. However, the move failed to reverse the decline. In 2015, Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion related to the acquisition and eventually sold the feature phone business to HMD Global and Foxconn in 2016.