Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

by Reid Hoffman

Nokia is a great example of the cost of caution. In 2007, Nokia was the world’s largest and most successful maker of mobile phones, with a market capitalization of just under $99 billion. Then Apple and Samsung came blazing into the market. In 2013, Nokia sold its money-losing handset operations to Microsoft for $7 billion, and in 2016 Microsoft sold its feature phone assets and the Nokia handset brand to Foxconn and HMD for just $350 million. That’s a drop in value for Nokia’s mobile phone business from somewhere in the neighborhood of $99 billion to $350 million in less than a decade—a decline of over 99 percent. At the time, Nokia’s decisions may have seemed to make sense. Nokia actually continued growing even after the launch of the iPhone and Google’s Android operating system. Nokia hit its peak in terms of unit volume when it shipped 104 million phones in 2010. But Nokia’s sales declined after that, and were surpassed by Android in 2011 and iPhone in 2012. By the time Nokia’s management realized the existential threat facing them, it was too late; even the desperation play of aligning themselves with Microsoft as its exclusive Windows Phone partner couldn’t reverse the decline.