The Nokia Revolution: The Story of an Extraordinary Company That Transformed an Industry.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Review

The Nokia Revolution: The Story of an Extraordinary Company That Transformed an Industry.

By Dan Steinbock. Amacom, 394 pages. $27.95.

Mention Nokia, and most readers will properly identify the Finnish cellular phone and Internet company that has seized market share around the world from the likes of AT&T and Motorola. But this intriguing corporate history relates the story of a company in a relatively remote area that has constantly reinvented itself.

Nokia began as a forest products company in 1865, later acquiring rubber and electrical power concerns. Its development as a high-tech power dates to the 1960s, when it became a highly diversified firm acquiring other companies at what the author says was a comparatively frantic pace. Interestingly, it was the collapse of the Soviet Union -- a powerful trading partner -- and a subsequent recession in Finland in the late 1980s that spurred Nokia...