Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo interview: A liberating feeling / Posted by Ari 15.02.2009 08:31

Many visitors at the Nokia headquarters in Espoo, Finland, are surprised if they happen to spot CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, or another member of senior management having lunch at the cafeteria. The top management is queuing up with everyone else and sharing tables with other lunch guests. Of course, the number of travel days and cabinet lunches reduce the likelyhood of spotting Kallasvuo at the cafeteria, but still.

Now, Nokia's CEO has moved away from his top floor office in the headquarters. He didn't pack and go home, he didn't camp at the airport, but he moved his desk to an open space office on the fourth floor where the other guys are working. "A liberating feeling," said Kallasvuo. Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo gave an extensive interview to the Finnish 'Financial Times', Talouselämä. The interview was published on February 13, 2009.

Kallasvuo recalled his commitment to win back market share in the United States. When he started as the CEO, he wowed not to sleep before Nokia was back on track in the U.S. Market share has been declining ever since. The fact is that it took two years to setup a division that is focusing on the U.S. carriers alone. He is expecting results from 2009 on.

Interestingly, Kallasvuo names Google and Apple as Nokia's new competitors. He has used the iPhone as an internal "alarm clock" at Nokia to wake up product designers to the new reality. Any time soon, Nokia brand may not be as sexy as Apple, because Nokia's priority is to maximize financial results by a careful balancing act between market share and profitability. Kallasvuo is totally committed to the Symbian S60 and to the legacy S40 software platforms, but doesn't rule out Linux. "Linux-path has continued," he said.

For over a year, Nokia has been promoting its new services concept, Ovi. It is still confusing people who view Nokia solely as a consumer electronics manufacturer. Nokia, however, has moved on to a new era of devices and services. Kallasvuo positioned Nokia's strategy, "Our strategy is to build solutions that integrate mobile devices and related services in a right way." He is happy with the early success of Comes with Music business model and service concept that may have been a risky experiment by Nokia, but has turned out to be attractive value proposition for consumers.

A huge global corporation based in a small remote country is a setup that occasionally causes friction between Nokia and its home base Finland. Lately, Nokia has been accused of pressuring law makers to establish a new law that would allow corporations to monitor employees' email messages. Kallasvuo denied the accusations as absurd. During the previous CEO's tenure, however, the public prosecutor investigated a case when monitoring had been done, but the case was dropped.

Kallasvuo saw new opportunities, and challenges, invigorating the whole company, "We are not just the market leader who is defending its position. Now, we have an opportunity to conquer new markets and to do new things."