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By Ben King, 16 January 2002 16:35

NEWS Today marks the 10th anniversary of Jorma Ollila's tenure at the head of the world's leading mobile phone handset company, Nokia. Ollila is widely credited with turning the company from a loss-making conglomerate with its roots in paper products like toilet rolls, into a mobile phone giant. The bookish-looking Finn has held his job for much longer than many tech companies have existed and steered the company safely through a decade of wild ups and downs in the telecoms industry. The value of the company has rocketed during his tenure - it's worth 164 times what it was when he took over in 1991, and only slightly less than the gross national product of Finland. It's so important to the nation's economy, in fact, that any dip in the company's fortunes sends Finns into a panic that their pensions are about to disappear. In the technology business, though, the next revolution is only a few months away, and the future of the Finnish state pension is now staked on the success of 3G, and how well Ollila, who has recently signed a new four-year contract, will deal with it. The company brought us many of the advances in phone design that we now take for granted, like press-on covers and downloadable ringtones. It was also the first company to popularise the increasingly lucrative text message service, with the legendary 2110 phone - the company's classic handset, which still gets mobile enthusiasts dewy-eyed. But most importantly, Nokia was the company that discovered that the telephone could be an object of desire. Ben Wood, analyst at Gartner, said: "The company has a 25-year brand strategy. We're only in year 12. They were the first to realise the importance of design. The handset market is largely a replacement market, and brand is an extremely important factor in determining what handsets people use." The company has made some clever bets about the wireless data services that will be the precursors to 3G. It was widely criticised last year for the failure to deliver a GPRS handset, and concentrate on the less advanced HSCSD technology, which many thought would be a flop - but the slow roll-out of GPRS has vindicated its strategy. Nokia has also been more financially prudent than many of its rivals. They have been choosier with the networks who they have offered big vendor financing packages, unlike some of their rivals who are finding it hard to get their debts repaid. Ollila, who was formerly chief financial officer, has been widely applauded for his firm hand on the financial tiller. However, Nokia's early application offerings and software packages, designed to prepare the first steps for 3G, have received a less enthusiastic reception. Shifting from 2G business models and business culture to 3G will require a much greater range of skills, and force Nokia to work more closely with a wider range of partners. Gartner's Wood, however, believes they can do it: "They are very secretive, but they do tend to deliver on their promises. They say we'll deliver 3G handsets in H2 2002, and we believe they can." 3G will be a bigger shift than the jump from analogue to digital. In some ways, it's bigger than the shift from toilet paper to telecoms. Rather than making and selling products 3G winners have to juggle a complex set of revenue streams. The biggest challenges of Ollila's career could still be in the pipeline, but it would take a brave punter to bet against him.