Nokia’s mobile phone history starts with Nokia buying Mobira in 1979. Later on, in 1982, Nokia has successfully introduced its first car phone in 1982. In the 1990s Nokia, as a phone manufacturer, started to strive mostly because of the worldwide acceptance of a neutral, small independent Finnish product (Cord, 2015, page 39). Nonetheless, Nokia feared of the powerhouse …show more content…
In this paper, core competencies shall be defined as the following: “Core competencies are the main strengths or strategic advantages of a business, including the combination of pooled knowledge and technical capacities that allow a business to be competitive in the marketplace.”(Investopedia, n.d.)
Nokia’s core competencies until 1998 were: costs, the Research & Development (R&D) and most importantly their superb supply chain. The supply chain was unusually simple (as illustrated in figure XXX), and this allowed Nokia to adapt swiftly changing market at the time that convergence, which the reason why spending enormous amounts of money on R&D is so important to stay ahead of the competition.
As a result, Nokia mastered the convergence of multimedia phones, were 35% cheaper than the competition and with their supply chain they could exploit economies of scale with R&D and manufacturing. (Cord, 2015, page …show more content…
The employees became increasingly overwhelmed just by doing bureaucratic tasks instead of focusing on the vision causing to focus more on preserving the existing business instead of growing the core business (Cord, 2015, p. 201). As Nokia’s growth was stagnating, employees were too busy with becoming a paper conglomerate, as well as problems with upkeeping Apple’s pace of convergence.
New changes rose upon 2010 when a new CEO of Nokia was chosen. Stephen Elop tried to simplify the large organizational problem. He also started to focus more on maintaining the current business instead of securing Nokia’s future with investments (Cord, 2015, p. 203).
Shortly after 2010 Nokia also started to lose its core business of low-cost mobile phones in the emerging target markets. The situation further escalated when more people were being laid-off and Nokia was in the deep financial crisis, which inevitably led to the sale of the Devices & Services department to Microsoft and retrieving from the mobile phone market. Find