Nokia Ringo is the latest development in the NOKIA range oif Cell Phones. What is the secret of this phenomenal sucess ? For Finns, Cell Phone giant NOKIA has brought Global Values along with Global Vulnerabilities. But what if such a corporate State goes against the grain of Finland’s social welfare ethos ?
A Company that produced everything frompaper to rubber boots was inspired to be lieve that the future lay in the Cell Phones that now bind Finns and a total of a billion people in an invisible web around the world. The Company was NOKIA, after a town of that name on a river of that name in southwest FINLAND.
As the decade progressed NOKIA advanced its multinational interestes and expanded its work force, becomingthe engine of Finland’s economy representing two-thirds of the stock market’s value and a fifth of the country’s total exports. At its peak, in March 2003, NOKIA’s stock wass worth $300 billion, more than any other Company in Europe. By last year, 37 of every 100 Cell Phones sold across the Globe bore the NOKIA stamp.
According to Sociologist Pasi Maenpaa, who has studied the Cell Phone habit that has made the 5 million Finns and their sparsely populated country the world’s most interconnected. He further says NOKIA is a State within a State. According to one hotellier, " We pay more attention to the Chief Executive of of NOKIA than to the Prime Minister’’.
About 22, 000 of NOKIA’s 54, 000 employees worldwide are in Finland - but they include 11, 000 of its main R&D Staff as well as the top management positions that could be based anywhere the Firm chose to make corporate headquarters. According to newspaper reports, NOKIA is shortly establishing a Factory in the outskirts of Chennai. To be known as NOKIA City ?