Industrial conglomerate
In 1898, Eduard Polón founded Finnish Rubber Works, manufacturer of galoshes and other rubber products, which later became Nokia's rubber business.[26] At the beginning of the 20th century, Finnish Rubber Works established its factories near the town of Nokia and began using Nokia as its product brand.[31] In 1912, Arvid Wickström founded Finnish Cable Works, producer of telephone, telegraph and electrical cables and the foundation of Nokia's cable and electronics businesses.[26] At the end of the 1910s, shortly after World War I, the Nokia Company was nearing bankruptcy.[32] To ensure the continuation of electricity supply from Nokia's generators, Finnish Rubber Works acquired the business of the insolvent company.[32] In 1922, Finnish Rubber Works acquired Finnish Cable Works.[33] In 1937, Verner Weckman, a sport wrestler and Finland's first Olympic Gold medalist, became President of Finnish Cable Works, after 16 years as its Technical Director.[34] After World War II, Finnish Cable Works supplied cables to the Soviet Union as part of Finland's war reparations. This gave the company a good foothold for later trade.[34]
The three companies, which had been jointly owned since 1922, were merged to form a new industrial conglomerate, Nokia Corporation in 1967 and paved the way for Nokia's future as a global corporation.[35] The new company was involved in many industries, producing at one time or another paper products, car and bicycle tires, footwear (including rubber boots), communications cables, televisions and other consumer electronics, personal computers, electricity generation machinery, robotics, capacitors, military communications and equipment (such as the SANLA M/90 device and the M61 gas mask for the Finnish Army), plastics, aluminium and chemicals.[25] Each business unit had its own director who reported to the first Nokia Corporation President, Björn Westerlund. As the president of the Finnish Cable Works, he had been responsible for setting up the company’s first electronics department in 1960, sowing the seeds of Nokia’s future in telecommunications.[36]
Eventually, the company decided to leave consumer electronics behind in the 1990s and focused solely on the fastest growing segments in telecommunications.[37] Nokian Tyres, manufacturer of tyres split from Nokia Corporation to form its own company in 1988[38] and two years later Nokian Footwear, manufacturer of rubber boots, was founded.[31] During the rest of the 1990s, Nokia divested itself of all of its
non-telecommunications businesses.[37]
Subject: Industrial conglomerate - Nokia 
Sun Sep 26, 2010 12:50 pm
