Today we’ll be talking about Nokia’s 5G Expansion. When Pekka Lundmark left Nokia in 2000 after a decade, the company was practically at the top of the mobile phone industry game. Twenty years after he returns to Nokia to work on the company’s corporate portfolio after a series of delicate faux pas that left the Finnish manufacturer at the mercy of Huawei and ZTE’s attractive price markdowns that led to leadership change. Now Nokia brings back an old employee to wire together with the array of assets the Espoo-based telecommunications network manufacturer has all over the world.
Nokia is a large employer in Finland, its vast experience in an ample variety of sectors paved the way for the current position that the company has today. Ranked within the top-five companies that provide telecommunications solutions in the world, competing with Huawei and Cisco put Nokia at the center of a complex battle that implicates cyber-security, state policy, and technological dominance.
From digital services, patents, IP routing, optical networks, software, mobile and fixed networks, Pekka Lundmark must put all those assets to work towards the position that the company he now leads again embarks for the future. In a complex geopolitical situation that involves how nations interpret global cyber-security threats, Nokia is a big competitor as they produce equipment for the fifth-generation telecommunications protocol in a market where the United States —with difficulty— lobbied in name of Corporate America the cyber-security aspects of Chinese-made 5G tech.
Nokia’s 5G Dream
Ranging from government oversight probes, accusations of industrial espionage, racketeering charges, spyware, theft, sabotage, and utterly corrupt in-house corporate practices, Chinese-military owned Huawei gets multiple shuns all over the world. Attorney General William Barr stated that the reevaluation of Chinese-USA relations is now state policy and he encouraged the allies of his country to follow suit. US authorities want to invest in European companies in the fight for spyware-free 5G.
Washington DC’s lobby all over Europe becomes evident as many network carriers shun Chinese manufacturers and invest in European companies: Ericsson and Nokia. For Ericsson: outlook good, as the Swedish company will install 5G stations all over central Russia. For Nokia, setting a foothold in the South East Asia market will bolster their sales as they recently conducted the first live 5G non-standalone network trial in Singapore. Countries in South East Asia like neighboring Vietnam chose to look to other providers rather than Huawei, and now Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung, and ZTE fight for the Vietnamese 5G market.
In India, labor demand for R&D in the telecommunications sector in light of US visa restrictions has startups looking to hire domestic workers in that sector to feed state defense projects and a domestic 5G rollout as the Reliance Limited Group, a massive corporate conglomerate with interests in telecoms manufacturing delves into the 5G market seeking to cater the demand for high-end consumer electronics.
