Nokia crops logo in brand revamp because people think it still makes mobile phones

Finnish 5G equipment maker Nokia Oyj has redesigned its logo to stop people from associating it with mobile phones — a business it left almost a decade ago.

The brand revamp, announced on Sunday, comes alongside a set of new strategic pillars intended to enable faster growth as the world increasingly adopts fifth-generation mobile technologies.

“In most people’s minds, we are still a successful mobile phone brand, but this is not what Nokia is about, Chief Executive Office Pekka Lundmark said in an interview ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday. “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.”

Nokia-branded phones are still sold by HMD Global Oy. HMD got the license after Microsoft Corp., which bought the business in 2014, stopped using the name.

Lundmark also said that Nokia will focus on adding market share in the company’s business serving wireless service providers with network equipment. Nokia now has “the ammunition and the tools to take market share without sacrificing margins,” he said. That’s been helped by restrictions on Chinese rival, Huawei Technologies Co., after a number of European governments blocked the
company from selling parts for 5G networks.

Nokia also wants to ramp up growth in its business selling private 5G networks to companies. The enterprise business reached an 8 percent share of Nokia’s top line last year, and the next target is to push the business “to double-digit territory, mainly through organ-ic growth and smaller acquisitions,” the CEO said.

Still, Nokia ruled out taking the road of its main competitor Ericsson AB, whose $6.2 billion acquisition of Vonage Holdings Corp. was sparked by a similar aim to grow on the enterprise side.

Nokia recently regained an investment-grade BBB- rating from S&P Global Ratings, ending its more than decade-long slog in junk territory. Still, Lundmark sees more work to do, particularly on the company’s operating margins.

“We are not happy yet with where we are,” he said.