Comment by b8
Why didn't Nokia go bankrupt afterwards? They have Bell Labs, but don't make any interesting products.
Why didn't Nokia go bankrupt afterwards? They have Bell Labs, but don't make any interesting products.
So they gained a reputation for reliability/durability and pivoted to infra?
Nokia had, for example, excellent RF engineering talent. Personal anecdote: back in the day a Nokia phone would get a call through when other brands didn't, on the same telco.
That talent found great use in cellular base stations. Nokia has been making them for a long time, no real pivot involved, more like a split of a conglomerate into per-vertical businesses. Fun fact: Nokia started as a pulp mill, they made tires and rubber boots, and so on. Think Mitsubishi or such.
Nokia has a pretty successful business in things like cellular base stations, carrier networking, etc. - for example they brought their joint venture with Siemens (Nokia Siemens Networks) back in-house by buying Siemens' part out, and that does a lot of optical network stuff (DWDM backhaul equipment, etc), already had a cellular base-station business but then also bought competitor Alcatel Lucent, and a lot of provider network stuff came in with that (like FTTH equipment on the provider side). They also got Alcatel's undersea cable laying division.
So they still have a bunch of valuable and successful businesses even though their consumer business went to crap.