CEO Pekka Lundmark makes announcement on the eve of MWC23 beginning Monday. He says people still think Nokia is a mobile phone brand, and the redesign aims to change the perception.

Nokia has announced plans to change its brand identity for the first time in nearly 60 years, complete with a new logo, as the telecom equipment maker focuses on aggressive growth.

The new logo comprises five different shapes forming the word NOKIA. The iconic blue colour of the old logo has been dropped for a range of colours depending on the use.

"There was the association to smartphones and nowadays we are a business technology company," Chief Executive Pekka Lundmark told Reuters on Sunday in an interview.

He was speaking ahead of a business update by the company on the eve of the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) which opens in Barcelona on Monday and runs until March 2.

After taking over the top job at the struggling Finnish company in 2020, Lundmark set out a strategy with three stages: reset, accelerate and scale. With the reset stage now complete, Lundmark said the second stage is beginning.

Aiming for good growth

While Nokia still aims to grow its service provider business, where it sells equipment to telecom companies, its main focus is now to sell gear to other businesses.

"We had very good 21 percent growth last year in enterprise, which is currently about 8 percent of our sales, (or) 2 billion euros ($2.11 billion) roughly," Lundmark said. "We want to take that to double digits as quickly as possible."

Major technology firms have been partnering with telecom gear makers such as Nokia to sell private 5G networks and gears for automated factories to customers, mostly in the manufacturing sector.

Nokia plans to review the growth path of its different businesses and consider alternatives, including divestment.

"The signal is very clear. We only want to be in businesses where we can see global leadership," Lundmark said.

Nokia's move toward factory automation and datacentres will also see them locking horns with big tech companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon.


The new logo was a shock to me, but if you look at the evolution of the Nokia logo throughout history, the change in logos between 1965 and 1966 was also drastic. It will certainly take some time for many people to get used to the new logo, which could finally sever the connection with the old Nokia, which ceased to exist with the demise of the Devices and Services division.

So the change is here and it’s not going to go away whether we like it or not, and that’s what we can expect from Nokia in the future. The renewed strategy will drive Nokia to expand its networks more into the cloud space to exploit the exponential potential of networks and meet the future demands of the metaverse. Nokia will also focus even more on B2B technology innovation to drive digitization across all industries. The main goal is to increase efficiency, flexibility and productivity in a sustainable way, which is reflected in the dominant green-blue color scheme of the Nokia logo.

The strategy is based on six pillars, which probably stand for 6G or all the needed efforts to create the future version of the networks:

  • Grow market share with service providers, driven by continued technology leadership;
  • Expand the share of Enterprises within its customer mix;
  • Continue to manage its portfolio actively, to ensure a path to a leading position in all segments where it decides to compete;
  • Seize opportunities from sectors beyond mobile devices to monetize Nokia’s IP and continue to invest in R&D for Nokia Technologies;
  • Implement new business models, such as as-a-Service; and
  • Develop ESG into a competitive advantage and become the “trusted provider of choice” in the industry.