Nokia had been producing commercial and military mobile radio communications technology since the 1960s and later began developing mobile phones for the
Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) network standard that went online in the 1980s.
In 1982, Nokia (then Mobira) introduced its first
car phone, the Mobira Senator for NMT 450 networks. The Mobira Talkman, launched in 1984, was one of the world's first transportable phones. In 1987, Nokia introduced one of the world's first handheld phones, the Mobira Cityman 900. When the Mobira Senator of 1982 had weighed 9.8
kg (21.6
lb), and the Talkman just under 5 kg (11 lb), the Mobira Cityman weighed only 800
g (28
oz) with the battery and had a price tag of 24,000
Finnish marks (approximately
EUR 4,560).
[13] Despite the high price, the first phones were almost snatched from the sales assistants’ hands. Initially, the mobile phone was a ‘
yuppie’ product and a
status symbol.
NMT was the world's first mobile telephony standard that enabled international roaming, and provided valuable experience for Nokia for its close participation in developing
Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). It is a digital standard which came to dominate the world of mobile telephony in the 1980s and 1990s, in mid-2006 accounting for about two billion mobile telephone subscribers in the world, or about 80% percent of the total, in more than 200 countries. The world's first commercial GSM call was made in 1991 in Helsinki over a Nokia-supplied network, by then
Prime Minister of Finland Harri Holkeri, using a
Nokia phone.In the 1980s, during the era of its CEO
Kari Kairamo, Nokia expanded into new fields, mostly by acquisitions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the corporation ran into serious financial problems, a major reason being its heavy losses by the television manufacturing division (these problems probably contributed to Kairamo taking his own life in 1988). Nokia responded by streamlining its telecommunications divisions, and by divesting itself of the television and PC divisions.
Jorma Ollila, who became the CEO in 1992, made a strategic decision to concentrate solely on telecommunications. Thus, during the rest of the 1990s, Nokia continued to divest itself of all of its non-telecommunications divisions.
The exploding worldwide popularity of mobile telephones, beyond even Nokia's most optimistic predictions, caused a
logistics crisis in the mid-1990s. This prompted Nokia to overhaul its entire logistics operation. Logistics continues to be one of Nokia's major advantages over its rivals, along with greater economies of scale
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