There is an approximately one-in-three chance that the next person you see holding a cell phone against the side of their head will be speaking into a Nokia product. Such is the level of worldwide market penetration reaching 35.3 percent of the 97 million phones sold in the first quarter of this year-of one of the world's leading telecommunications companies.

Like many a modern giant, Nokia has humble origins. In 1865, an engineer named Fredrik Idestam began manufacturing paper in a wood pulp mill he built by a river in southern Finland. He called the company Nokia, which also became the name of the town that gradually grew up around the mill as Idestam's business expanded into the export market.

Although the town still exists, the modern company no longer has a presence there. The Nokia Group was formed in 1967 as a result of a merger between the Finnish Rubber Works, which had also started life in the town of Nokia, and the Finnish Cable Works. The latter, based in Helsinki, had sown the seeds of the Group's future success when it moved into electronics in the early 1960s.

Nokia's breathtaking success lies in its past attentiveness to the potential of the digital age. It began developing its DX 200 digital switch more than twenty-five years ago, and from the start played a major role in the Global System for Mobile Communications that was set up to standardize mobile phone networks at the end of the 1980s.

你碰到的下一個(gè)拿手機(jī)的人大約有三分之一的幾率是在對(duì)著諾基亞手機(jī)講話。這就是諾基亞進(jìn)入全球市場(chǎng)的水平：今年第一季度售出的手機(jī)總數(shù)為九千七百萬(wàn)臺(tái)，市場(chǎng)占有率高達(dá)35.3%，是世界電訊傳播類公司的龍頭之一。

和許多現(xiàn)代巨型企業(yè)一樣，諾基亞起家時(shí)也很卑微。1865年，一位名叫弗蘭德里克·艾德斯塔姆（Fredrik Idestam）的工程師，在芬蘭南部一條河的河邊建起一個(gè)紙漿廠，從事造紙業(yè)。他為這家公司取名為諾基亞， 隨著艾德斯塔姆事業(yè)拓展到出口市場(chǎng)，公司逐漸成長(zhǎng)起來(lái)，后來(lái)那個(gè)城市的 名字也取為諾基亞。

這個(gè)城市現(xiàn)今依然存在，但這家現(xiàn)代產(chǎn)業(yè)公司已不復(fù)存在。諾基亞集團(tuán)成立于1967年，由芬蘭橡膠及電纜制造業(yè)兩家合并而成，前者最初也建在諾基亞城。后者的總部設(shè)在赫爾辛基，60年代初期轉(zhuǎn)向發(fā)展電子業(yè)，從而為該集團(tuán)未來(lái)的成功播下了種子。

諾基亞驚人的成就歸功于其昔日的敏銳觀察，預(yù)見(jiàn)到數(shù)字時(shí)代的無(wú)窮潛力。早在25年前，它就開(kāi)始發(fā)展DX 200數(shù)碼交換機(jī)，從此開(kāi)始主導(dǎo)全球移動(dòng)通訊系統(tǒng)，該系統(tǒng)是在80年代末期為實(shí)現(xiàn)移動(dòng)電話網(wǎng)絡(luò)系統(tǒng)的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)化而建立的。