Nevertheless it, too, had invested strongly, using mainly foreign credits. Therefore the substantial devaluations of 1991 and 1992 triggered a wave of bankruptcies. The crisis led to a successful rationalisation of the public sector and taught companies the importance of a healthy balance sheet. By the late 1990's the average gearing of Finnish companies had improved to near the 50 per cent internationally accepted as good, having been down around 20 per cent in the beginning of the 1980s. Investments have been dimensioned on the basis of cash flow and capacity to self-finance.
Stock markets are now a central source of capital.
Companies have become relatively independent of banks and the banks' risk concentrations have diminished. The expectations and risks of the economy have been focused on the IT business in a new way. In the early 1990s Nokia underwent its own crisis, which led to a radical pruning operation that saw several business segments discarded. In the core sector that it had chosen, mobile phones, the company became the international market leader. As profits grew, the Nokia share price increased a hundred-fold.