1865: a pulp mill on a river
Nokia began in 1865, when mining engineer Fredrik Idestam built a wood pulp mill on the banks of the Nokianvirta river in southern Finland, in the small town that gave the company its name. For its first century, Nokia had nothing to do with communications at all — it made paper products, full stop.
The merger that built a conglomerate
In 1967, the Nokia paper company formally merged with two other Finnish firms, Finnish Rubber Works and Finnish Cable Works, to form Nokia Corporation. That merger is the real turning point: Finnish Cable Works already had a growing electronics division, and over the following decades Nokia grew into a sprawling conglomerate that, at various points, made everything from rubber boots and tires to televisions, personal computers, and telecommunications equipment.
The phone era
Nokia's mobile phone business took off through the 1990s and 2000s, eventually making it the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer by volume for well over a decade. Models like the Nokia 3310 became so widely owned that "unbreakable Nokia phone" turned into its own internet meme, years after the device itself had gone out of production. At its peak, Nokia's global market share and brand recognition were close to unmatched in the mobile phone industry.
The fall, and what's left
The rise of smartphones running iOS and Android caught Nokia flat-footed in the late 2000s, and its market share collapsed through the following decade. Nokia sold its phone business to Microsoft in 2014, and the Nokia-branded phones sold today come from HMD Global, an independent company that licenses the name. What remains under the Nokia Corporation umbrella is a business-to-business telecommunications company headquartered in Espoo, Finland, supplying network infrastructure and equipment to mobile carriers around the world — a much less visible business than the consumer phones that made the brand famous, but a substantial one.