There was a time when Finland was synonymous with mobile phones and technological innovation. The Nokia ringtone was heard worldwide, and the company's revenue peaked at more than 50 billion euros in 2007.
After that, the company lost its way as smartphones powered by Apple and Google dominated the market.
But this week's podcast is all about the glory days — what it was like when a Finnish company was the number one supplier of cell phones, and especially what it was like to be a foreigner working for the company and helping it on its way towards global domination.
"I met a Finnish guy in a pub in Wiltshire in England and basically, because there was no HR department that I was aware of, he said do you want to join and I said yes," said Tim Rowe, a UK citizen who was working for Vodafone until he moved to Tampere in 1992 for a job at Nokia.
Listen to the episode via this embedded player, on Yle Areena, via Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Rowe tells APN about the shock of his first sauna evening at Nokia, and how the employees knew they were doing something special.
"You remember back in the day hardly anyone had a mobile phone and it was the size of a house brick or something, so Nokia was pioneering in the sense of bringing mobile telephony to more and more people," said Rowe.
"So in that sense, it was groundbreaking. But I don't think anyone was thinking that Nokia would become the darling of the New York Stock Exchange, which they were for a while."
Phil Schwarzmann moved to Finland from the US in the early 2000s to work in the marketing department. He recalled that the cachet of a Nokia background was a big thing in Finland, and helped him overcome some challenges when confronted with frosty service in a car showroom, for example.
"I pulled out my Nokia 9210i and had in my hand to show the salespeople that I mean business, that I'm a real person and it worked," said Schwarzmann.
"Someone came up to me. I don't know if it was the phone or not, but if you had one of those devices, you had arrived, you were, you were in the business world and was deserving of a €7000 used Volkswagen Golf."
We also heard from Aalto University's Anne Valtonen, an ex-Nokian who has been working on a digital archive detailing much of the Nokia design team's material.
You can view the online archive here.
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Egan Richardson and Zena Iovino presented this episode of All Points North. The sound engineer was Tuomas Vauhkonen.
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