Elena Luque y Alba Giannelli
On March 13th 2024, Ignacio Gallego, Nokia´s Country Manager, talked about the importance of change in the industry of technology at 9 in the morning of the second day of the Digital Week of the European University of Madrid, for which students of ADE and Communication assisted.
Nokia is a company that, since the end of the 17th century, not only has dominated the industry of technology but also played a key role in the production of a multitude of other goods such as toilet paper, car tires and electric cables. Today, Nokia is most known as the company that reached the top of the telephonic market in the 2000s by introducing phone models such as the Nokia 3210 y el Nokia N95. These completely revolutionized communication and left an unremovable footprint in today’s technology. By this means, in 2007 Nokia reached a market share of 48.7%. Although currently there are other technological giants, such as Apple, that dominate the sphere of telecommunication, Nokia continues to hold an important role in the development of the new high-tech era. As Ignacio Gallego stated “the key to remain alive in the industry of technology is innovation”.
They adapted to change, creating technology that helps the world connect together. This means that, while on one hand they maintained their initial goal, on the other they kept their eyes on innovation and adaptation to the technological revolution that we are currently in. Nokia is a B2B (Back to back) technology innovation leader that aims at realizing the potential of digital in every industry. Having been in the business for more that 150 years, today the company operates in 130 countries having €22,3 bn worth of net sales in 2023.
Ignacio Gallego explains that Nokia´s current agenda needs, for its own success, to take the future into account. Today, they build products to help people and companies deliver digital services. In this way, their important decisions about capital investments are taken after drawing a path that looks into what we expect the future to be . But, what do we understand as “the future” when talking about the technology industry? Usually in the telecom industry the generations take 10 years to fully develop, meaning that it’s essential to think 10 years ahead in order to get as close to the future as possible. This is because, when it comes to high-tech evolution, society and companies need to adapt to these innovation waves and standardize them. Moreover, 10 years are needed in order to develop because of the human and material effort that it takes for the industry to evolve and conform to the new established system. Gallego recognises this forecast as the 2030 Technological Agenda. Once the future is recognized, it is needed to be competitive in front of other industries. For this, Nokia created a standard to help create technology that will get everywhere in the world. In this standard, the “human, physical and digital worlds will become seamlessly integrated”. In such a manner, the company sees the upcoming future as one evolved into a combination of these three sectors.
Defining the future of Nokia as a company, as previously mentioned, is the 2030 telecommunication Agenda. It is shaped by a series of macro trends that include geopolitics, sustainability, cybersecurity ,innovation but most importantly Artificial Intelligence. Within these trends, the company aims at seamlessly integrating the human, physical and digital worlds, where Nokia’s action is surrounded by an increased focus on environmental and social aspects. In addition, we must take into account third elements such as the meta-verse (that had a value creation of 5 trillion in 2030 ), the Cloud (that used to target the big data centers but today is used by almost every single company to optimize their operations), Web 3.0, Blockchains and more. The future is defined by Nokia as a digital-physical fusion. Through this fusion, humans are able to generate physical elements into a digital simulation. Thanks to this, we can anticipate what will happen, evolving the capacity of improving the performance of a machine or even of a human body.
In conclusion, the evolution of technology requires more connectivity capabilities than we have today. The technological industry needs to be further developed, creating a system based in a symmetry within security and sustainability.