They went back to the drawing board and got really big in the wirekess communications field, I believe. When I lived as a quasi-new EE grad from the States in Oulu, I actually applied to work for their 6G department, since I quite liked the math around digital communications and it was a huge thing my advisor had hyped up in college. Alas, Northwestern just wasn't impressive enough a school for people in other countries to know about by name, and I never even got a reply... ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Nokia makes all kinds of telecommunications gear that is not consumer facing.
One time I was working in an old Cold War bunker in Finland that was being used as a datacenter. Really wild place with servers in rows in cavernous caves. The toilet paper dispenser in the men's room was made by Nokia ;)
A Swedish friend of mine has a chainsaw guard made by Nokia.
Personally I read it a little differently, more along the lines of "I didn't realise Nokia was that big! Are they involved in other sectors I don't know about?"
This is correct. All I know them from is their mobile phone business, which is all but gone nowadays. The Nokia brand lives on through HMD Global so I figured Nokia itself must do a ton of other stuff. I got a few replies with what they do nowadays, thanks!
Maybe on Reddit. Here, I instead did learn that Nokia still has a substantial worldwide stake in telecommunications, especially wireless. And that Nokia has much older origins than that dating back to selling rubber in the 19th century. even if their heyday of consumer products is long over, a few responses helped me see otherwise.
Regardless, the user already clarified their point so this is simply a thought exercise rather than a search for truth.
You don't need to accurately assess it to be surprised they still have a lot of employees. They don't seem to do much anymore that is visible. Quite a long time ago they were a leading company. I have no idea what they even do anymore.
I would read his comment more as "I didn't know the company was still so big" than "wow how stupid are they that they didn't fire all those people years ago"
there are more inscects in a cubic mile of rural land than humans on earth. are you surprised?
Humans in general are horrible at encompassing large numbers. We can interpret and understand them, but our mental model sense of scale isn't flexed often enough in daily life (where we maybe deal with thousands at most) to truly appreciate hundreds of thousands, or millions intuitively.
To be fair, 86000 is the size of Meta. and I'm surprised to begin with that Meta has 86000 employees to begin with. They weren't saying that they shouldn't have that many employees, just unaware of the scale of the company.
There are only handful of mobile network infrastructure providers left in the world. Huawei 30%, Ericsson , Nokia, ZTE. Samsung replaces ZTE in base stations.
4G/5G and PON(technology used for providing "Fiber To The Home") - these are really big markets as you can imagine. But everybody is cutting investments right now in fear of recession.