Nokia already owns the global cell-phone market. Now Tero Ojanperä is launching the world's biggest delivery system for services, apps, and entertainment.
Despite the general tension typical of an industry in free fall, there is a reunion vibe and everyone greets one another warmly over cocktails, throwing out a bit of cocksure swagger to project the notion that they can still deliver a hit. Still, nobody in attendance would deny that the days of record companies making a killing in the music industry are over.
The hosts for the evening are Nokia's 43-year-old executive vice president of entertainment and communities, Tero Ojanperä, and Eurythmics founder and Nokia consultant, Dave Stewart. The two make for an odd pairing: Stewart with his quintessential British rock-'n'-roll-ness and Ojanperä with his Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness. But tuning in closely to Ojanperä's precise, inflected words, it's hard to elude his magnetism, a cross between Andy Warhol mystic and James Bond villain.
Before dinner is served, Ojanperä taps his glass of pinot noir with a knife, waves a piece of paper at his guests, and begins his opening remarks.
"This is an early advertisement from Nokia. It says: A tire you can trust ... from Nokia," he says. "Nokia is a great company from Finland that I joined in 1990. In its history, it has made great car tires and also great rubber boots."
The crowd is visibly flummoxed; after a smattering of awkward laughter, table chatter resumes. Ojanperä is close to losing his audience but plunges on. "We have since become the No. 1 cell-phone company in the world, with nearly 40% market share and 1.1 billion users. Today, Nokia is making 13 phones every second. So you can think about how many we are making during your dinner."
The magnitude of those numbers seems to register on the diners, drawing their attention back to this stranger dressed in black.
"But the numbers are not important," Ojanperä continues. "The point here is, the world is a vibrant place. We are in India, China, Africa, Russia, the United States. Think about a young boy in India who is getting his first phone: He can listen to music or take a picture or watch a movie or even make a movie. In many ways this" -- he holds up his slim E71 handset -- "is his first computer and it is connecting him to the rest of the world for the first time."
Because the group is composed of music execs, Ojanperä then explains Nokia's Comes With Music service, which offers unlimited downloads of more than 6 million songs (that can be kept for life) and is paid for with a fee built into the cost of certain mid-to-high-end Nokia handsets. "The two forces we are competing against are actually nonconsumption and piracy," Ojanperä says. "If we can get people engaged with music and compete against piracy, then we have won the war. And we believe we are revolutionizing the way music is being consumed."
Eyes roll in the audience, but Ojanperä reels them back in. "It's not only about music," he adds. "It's about paying."
That last word hangs in the room's dim yellow glow. "We want to make a difference in the payment for music. Nokia not only wants to revolutionize music, but I am claiming now that we will quickly be the world's biggest entertainment media network."
The last comment elicits snickers from every table. Ojanperä waits for the last chuckle to die. "You can laugh and say, 'What is the point? Nokia is a cell-phone company; it will never get into the entertainment business.' That's okay. Laugh. That's what people did when we said we were going to be the biggest cell-phone company in the world -- back when we were making car tires and rubber boots."
Last year, Nokia sold 472 million cell phones and generated $70 billion in revenue, earning $7 billion in profit. It is the 88th-largest company in the world by revenue, counts more than 1.1 billion customers, sells its products in more than 150 countries, and runs an operating system translated into more than 180 different languages. Nokia's share of the global cell-phone market is greater than its next three competitors combined. Yet when I ask CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to describe Nokia, the first thing he says is, "We are not a cell-phone company."
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