MWC 2023: Nokia is no longer a mobile brand, and the company created a new logo to prove it


Their logo is the only thing that broke

MWC just started and what better way to kick off the event than by having Nokia present its new logo? That’s right. After 60 years, they changed their logo. It’s probably designed by the same person that created the new Kia logo. It makes sense too because “Nokia” is just a pessimistic version of the car company.

Kidding aside, this new logo was created to remind you that their new business is not manufacturing phones. You better move on. That ship has sailed. The company is now centered on creating telecommunications equipment (like Huawei and Ericsson) and IoT products and appliances. And to prove they’re not just creating phones, the iconic old logo will still be present within HMD’s portfolio.

In most people’s minds, we are still a successful mobile phone brand, but this is not what Nokia is about,” Nokia CEO Pekka Lundmark told Bloomberg. “We want to launch a new brand that is focusing very much on the networks and industrial digitalization, which is a completely different thing from the legacy mobile phones.”

In over 60 years, the company went a long way. Nokia did not even start as a tech company. They started as a sugarmilling company and also had sold tissue rolls back in the day. Drop that tissue sheet and you break your entire floor or your butt when wiping.

They only got to the tech business just recently. The success of the Nokia 3310 made it a household name for cellphones in general. That phone and subsequent “feature phones” as we call it today, made Nokia the success we once knew. However the comapany’s reign went into an end after they underestimated Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. To solve this, Nokia sold most of its mobile assets to Microsoft which gave birth to the Lumia devices powered by Windows Phone. That was a monumental disaster and a severe miscommunication. It resulted to Microsoft losing about $8 billion and had to reevaluate its mobile business

In 2016, former top employees of Nokia created their own company called HMD Global based in Finland. HMD Global purchased the remaining assets of the Nokia Mobile brand and has since released several Android smartphones under the Nokia name. This was successful especially in North America and Europe. The main feature of HMD’s handsets are their longevity.