At Salo, Nokia's factory in the Finnish backwoods, it now takes four days, not five months, to get a line fully ramped-up. By the end of this year three of Nokia's nine major plants around the world will be in China. The Finns have other ways to resist declining margins. Interbrand, consultants in New York, annually rank companies according to their brand values. The strong brand is why Matti Alahuhta, president of Nokia phones, insists that there is still life in digital phones.
Consumers buy phones more for emotional reasons than for the latest technology.
The future, however, depends on Ollila's making the right call on the next generation of data phones. Mess this up and the company will tank. Nokia says it will produce GPRS data handsets in volume by the fourth quarter of this year. Nokia will have that, too. This network buildup is casting a shadow over handset sales.