Nokia boss marks 10 years

January 16, 2002 Posted: 1313 GMT

LONDON (CNN) -- For the past decade, Finland's Nokia has been a leader in the mobile phone industry.

And during the time, the company has been led by one man – Jorma Ollila. Nokia's chief executive has taken the company from a domestic-dependent conglomerate to a global success story.

On January 16, 1992, Nokia was still manufacturing goods like televisions and stereo loudspeakers. But its consumer electronics division was losing money, and other units were not doing much better.

	Nokia are the Manchester United of the mobile phone market. They keep winning everything.
	Simon Rockman What Mobile Magazine

In walked Ollila. He quickly launched a restructuring program that lasted through to 1996. That was followed by rapid growth for the remainder of the 1990s.

"It was obviously a task of building a new company with a new morale, investing in the future, on businesses which would bring the kind of returns that shareholders would expect us to make and simultaneously divesting those businesses where we did not see the future," Ollila told CNN.

Nokia started making the world's first mass-market mobile phone for Europe's new GSM standard. When that standard became widely accepted, Nokia products caught fire.   

"Nokia are the Manchester United of the mobile phone market," Simon Rockman of What Mobile Magazine told CNN. "They keep winning everything."

Today, as he marks his 10^th anniversary at the helm, Ollia oversees one of the biggest companies in Europe. Nokia now controls one-third of the world's mobile phone market. Its share price has jumped 100-fold. He is among the longest running and most respected business leaders in the world.

But Ollia faces new challenges as he begins his second decade at Nokia. 

Mobile-phone makers have been hit hard by an economic slowdown and recession in many economies, such as Japan and the U.S. At the same time many telecom operators have canceled orders for new infrastructure, choosing to control costs and cut debts.

Meanwhile, consumers have delayed purchases of new phones while they await more attractive services that give quick access to the Internet -- so-called third-generation technology.

In response to the sector downturn, Ollila and his management team have cut 4,700 jobs from Nokia's 60,000-strong workforce.

But despite the belt-tightening, Nokia is standing by its profit forecast for 2001.

	Nokia's 12-month U.S. stock performance

Last month, the company reaffirmed earlier projections that sales will grow by 20 percent in the final quarter of this year, compared with 7.1 billion in the third-quarter but would be lower than the 9.28 billion posted in the fourth quarter of last year.

It said earnings per share would be at the upper end or above estimates of between 0.18 and 0.20 ($0.16 and $0.18). In the same period a year ago, the company posted earnings per share of 0.25 when demand for handsets reached a peak.

Nokia is scheduled to release its fourth-quarter results on January 24.