Why Nokia bids goodbye to manufacturing in Finland

[alok agarwal]

SALO, FINLAND: Nokia workers in Salo thought chief executive Stephen Elop signalled that their plant, Europe's last major mobile phone factory, would survive when he visited in February, but last week he announced its closure anyway.

This final chapter in Nokia's long goodbye to manufacturing in Finland will claim about 850 jobs, on top of 1,000 announced earlier in the year, and rob the town of 90 percent of its tax revenue. Once the world's dominant mobile phone provider, Nokia has been bested in a smartphone war by Apple and Samsung and other phones running Google software. It is also losing share in the market for more basic phones.

Its strategy to reverse its fortunes, abandoning its own Symbian smartphone software in favour of a largely untested alternative from Microsoft, Elop's former employer, has limped from setback to setback. Sales of Nokia's new Windows Phone models, the Lumia series, have been slow to pick up, while the bottom has fallen out of the market for old phones running dead-end Symbian.

As recently as this week, Microsoft revealed that a new version of its software won't run on the existing Lumia range, and a Wall Street analyst said the software giant was looking at making its own phones in direct competition with its new partner. Over two years, workers at Nokia have become familiar with bad news, but are still not inured to it.

"During my whole time, 15 years and 10 months with Nokia, someone was always saying Nokia will abandon Finland. But it was still a surprise," said Katja Taskinen, who took a buyout offer in an earlier round of cuts this year.

Rivals have long been focused in Asia, and analysts had said Nokia should do the same, but the workers believed they had been made an exception. "We were promised continuity," said Anne Malm, head shop steward of the Salo plant, which was set up in the 1970s and often held up as a model for other Nokia factories around the world.

"Salo is where it all began. Salo has been the benchmark. If there were troubles at other factories, Salo has been the place from where teams were sent to extinguish those fires."

PROMISES, PROMISES

Some are hoping for government intervention. "The government promised us that they'll use all the instruments available to help us," said Antti Rantakokko, Salo's mayor. Jukka Roos, a local member of the Social Democratic Party and former lawmaker, said the government should not allow the country's flagship technology company to make such drastic cuts. "The government and unions should react and put pressure on Nokia," he said. "What the hell are they doing?"

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