INTRODUCTION
Nokia, the large Finnish industrial group, was founded in 1966 through a merger of three companies. The main business units at that time were pulp and paper, tyres and cables, with paper manufacturing as the oldest business, established 130 years ago. During the 1970s Nokia started to diversify through expansion in different electronic product areas.
In 1995, after twenty years of acquisitions, divestments, internationalisation and rapid growth, 99 per cent of the turnover (FIM36,810 million)1 was represented by three business units in electronics: mobile phones, telecommunications and consumer electronics. The three original businesses had been divested and 91 per cent of the turnover was derived from exports. Nokia had become one of the leading global producers of mobile phones and telecommunication systems, and the third biggest in Europe in consumer electronics, with 34,000 employees, 14,000 of them working outside Finland in 45 different countries.
The Nokia case is a remarkable corporate transformation, achieved through focusing the company’s strategic activities in the consumer electronics industry, where Nokia attained its position after a series of rapid acquisitions of ? ve different European companies between 1983 and 1992. Furthermore, for more than a decade from the mid-1970s, computers/information systems also formed a business area within electronics.
FORMULATION OF A NEW LONG-TERM VISION FOR NOKIA
During the mid-1970s, after the oil crisis in 1973, Nokia experienced strategic problems. The original core businesses, representing the main part of the corporation, were expected to have limited growth in the future. Top management felt that the company could get into serious trouble if no strategic changes were initiated.
The change process began with the formulation of a growth vision, which implied new strategic directions for Nokia. The ambition was to enter industrial sectors with growth potential, so as to increase the share of products with growth potential in Nokia’s product portfolio. The manufacture of televisions was to prove an important element in this. At the beginning of the 1980s, the total annual sales of TV sets in Europe were almost 20 million, about the same as in both the USA and Japan. However, the European market was much more fragmented, with several technical standards and local protectionism. The consequence was more local producers in Europe, each with a rather small production volume.
The two biggest European competitors were Philips and Thompson (France), but even these ms had fairly local strategies. Large production volume was at this time not regarded as a major critical factor for success. Instead, the exibility to change production rapidly from one type of TV set to another brand, model or size was a critical factor for competitiveness. Eventually, the non-European competition from the Japanese and other Far East companies led to an increased focus on price competition in Europe. With more focus on price, the small-scale orientation created vulnerability for several European companies.
NOKIA ENTERS THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY: THE ACQUISITIONS OF SALORA AND LUXOR
In the mid-1970s Nokia moved into computers, with the importation and distribution of Honeywell Bull computers, following which the then small electronic business area was divided into professional electronics and computers. At the same time, another opportunity to expand in electronics appeared when the Finnish army wanted a new type of portable radio telephone.
It invited most domestic rms in the electronics industry to develop them, and nearly all Finnish electronics ms started to construct mobile radio telephones. The military order was eventually placed with three different companies, Salora, Televa and Nokia. The top management in Nokia thought that three domestic companies in this area were too many. As Salora was regarded as slightly ahead in its R&D activities, Nokia made an initial contact with that company. A co-operation agreement was soon signed between Nokia and Salora regarding their radio telephone businesses, and in 1980 the co-operation was extended. A joint venture on a fty-fty basis was formed – Mobira, a mobile telephone business unit.
Salora was also the biggest manufacturer of TV sets in Finland, but in the late 1970s it had problems with its TV business because of a decline in the Scandinavian market. At the same time, the company’s owners were accused of selling on the black market and were forced to relinquish their ownership.
The Consumer Electronics Business Union bank looked for new owners and Nokia was invited to acquire Salora. But the head of Nokia’s electronics division, Kurt Wikstedt, was only interested in Salora’s mobile telephone business and not at all in consumer electronics, which were not seen as high-tech products. He saw no competitive advantages for Nokia in the consumer electronics sector: In Finland we cannot produce on such a scale in this product area that we could be successful. The production scale of Salora is too small.
We should concentrate on products where the production costs are high, as in professional electronics. Nokia’s group chief executive of? cer and his corporate planner were in favour of an acquisition, as they regarded consumer electronics as a growth industry. But Wikstedt’s arguments were stronger, and instead Salora was taken over by the shipbuilding company Hollming. The dif culties in Salora continued and the company made huge losses: FIM18 million in 1980 and FIM25 million in 1981.
The president of Salora was forced to resign after only a few years in of e and Salora was put up for sale again. But Nokia did not show any interest in the consumer electronics part of Salora. It just wanted Mobira. In this situation the owners of Salora, the Hollming Group, linked the possible sale of their share of Mobira to the sale of the rest of Salora. The result was a compromise – Nokia acquired 18 per cent of the shares in Salora in order to be allowed to acquire the remaining 50 per cent of Mobira from Salora. In 1982 Mobira became a subsidiary of Nokia, and Nokia became represented in the Salora board.
Nokia later acquired Televa as well and eventually became a global leader in mobile phones. The new president of Salora, Antti Lagerroos, succeeded in improving the company’s performance in consumer electronics: 1982 was a good year and 1983 was expected to be even more successful. Markets were growing rapidly. Salora obtained two big orders for colour TV sets which gave rise to capacity problems. Lagerroos looked for more production capacity and became interested in Luxor, a Swedish competitor, which itself had survival problems in the late 1970s.
In 1979 the Swedish state saved Luxor from bankruptcy, acquiring it from the family owners for the symbolic sum of one Swedish krona, and put fresh capital into the company in an attempt to improve its fortunes. In 1983 the Swedish Minister of Industry wanted a new solution for Luxor, after having subsidised a nancial reconstruction of the company. The minister looked for a large corporation as a partner, but held the opinion that Salora was not large or strong enough. Other rms showed an interest in acquiring Luxor, but none found favour with the Swedish governmental of cials.
In this situation, Antti Lagerroos introduced a new idea to Nokia’s top managers. Although Nokia’s previous interest in Salora was lukewarm, a Salora–Luxor combination put the matter in a quite different light; after all, internationalisation was an important ingredient in the Nokia corporate vision and Finnish rms had traditionally made their initial foreign expansion in the Swedish market. Nokia had also become more interested in know-how in mass production and marketing. The production knowledge in consumer electronics was quite different from that in the production of computers, for instance.
At the beginning of the 1980s, computers were still mostly tailor-made. Marketing too was different. Brands and distribution channels were important success factors in consumer electronics, where a good product was not enough in order to obtain a large market share. An acquisition of both Salora and Luxor could give Nokia the possibility of supplementing the competences in R&D and small-scale production with mass production and market orientation. Relations between the group chief executive of er of Nokia, Kari Kairamo, and ministers in the Swedish government were good, and Sweden was motivated to accept the successful Nokia Group as the acquiring company.
The production capacity of a combined Salora and Luxor was expected to make it a strong unit. The acquisition took place in January 1984 and Kari Kairamo stated: Nokia’s acquisition of Salora and Luxor means that the company’s position in Sweden is now much stronger. The Luxor, Salora and Nokia venture means that Scandinavian co-operation in this important area has improved.
Nokia: The Consumer Electronics Business Kairamo saw Luxor as a ? rst step in further international co-operation, and expected that the clear boundary between consumer electronics and professional electronics would disappear in the future. Kurt Wikstedt strongly stressed the international side of the acquisition: Now we enter Europe. We begin with Scandinavia. We try with Luxor to see if we can be successful in this business, and then continue with Europe. That is the strategy. After many twists and turns, Nokia had entered the consumer electronics business and taken a serious step into the international market.
The initial result of the acquisitions was that Nokia got 58 per cent of the shares in Salora and 51 per cent of the shares in Luxor. Later in 1984, Nokia increased its share to 70 per cent of the capital stock in Luxor. In 1983 the turnover for Luxor was FIM590 million and for Salora FIM737 million. The staff of Luxor was 1,500 and of Salora 1,700. All in all, Nokia now had 8,000 employees in its electronics businesses. Nokia’s acquired market share in the TV sector was 36 per cent in the Finnish market and over 20 per cent in the Swedish market.
THE INTEGRATION OF SALORA AND LUXOR
The new consumer electronics business was organised as a separate division in Nokia, partly because of the doubt over consumer electronics expressed by the head of the electronics division, Kurt Wikstedt. The president of Salora, Antti Lagerroos, was selected as the new president for consumer electronics (Salora–Luxor), and Kurt Wikstedt stayed as president for the remaining businesses in electronics, relabelled ‘industrial electronics’. The integration of Luxor and Salora was arduous, and made no real progress until the Swedish president of Luxor was forced to leave the company in May 1985.
Besides the declining consumer electronics business, Luxor also had a successful personal computer division. Nokia closed this computer division, which of course aroused a lot of criticism. Several managers in Nokia were of the opinion that the co-ordination of activities in Salora and Luxor was not suf? cient and that the potential synergy advantages had not been fully realised. In 1985 Salora–Luxor got a new president, Heikki Koskinen, when Antti Lagerroos was appointed director in charge of consumer electronics in the top management team of the Nokia Group.
Koskinen was a spokesman for decentralisation and local autonomy. Salora and Luxor kept their own sales subsidiaries; only logistics and R&D were integrated. Still, the development of Salora–Luxor was very favourable and quite pro? table in the mid-1980s. The production of TV sets in Luxor increased rapidly, although small (14-inch) TV sets represented almost 50 per cent of all production (see Exhibit 4). In 1987, the Salora–Luxor TV brands had a market share of 35 per cent in the Nordic markets. In Finland the market share was about 45 per cent.
According to Heikki Koskinen, Salora–Luxor was the only pro? table signi? cant consumer electronics producer in Europe in 1987. Gradually, Nokia increased its ownership share in both Luxor and Salora to 100 per cent. The aim of the continued integration was to arrange production in a more optimal way, and to utilise more effectively all the possibilities of synergy, including integrating production plants in a total product planning and production system, in order to decide more ef? ciently which products should be produced where and in what quantities.
NOKIA ENTERS MAJOR EUROPEAN MARKETS
In 1986, when the Luxor–Salora integration was considered to be under control, Nokia began to think of the future. Market share was already about 40 per cent in the Nordic markets, which implied that further expansion for Salora–Luxor in Scandinavia was not possible. An alternative growth and product brand strategy, to turn to western Europe, was decided during the strategic planning process in spring 1986.
Heikki Koskinen explained the plans: We had plans to acquire two major brands in Europe, of which we intended to build a local net of brands. One of the brands was going to be more extensive to be sold in all European countries where Nokia was active in consumer electronics. There were several reasons for entering the western European markets. It was thought to be important to be in the home markets of major competitors, in order to prevent them from dumping their products on Nokia’s domestic markets. European co-operation might also prevent the Japanese and American rms taking over the European TV markets.
The major European competitors Philips and Thompson started to co-operate within the Eureka framework (European Research Co-ordinating Agency)2 in order to develop the European HDTV (high-de nition TV) concept. This joint development was a threat to smaller European producers, which were afraid of not getting the key technology when needed. In order to become a partner in the development process of the HDTV concept, the opinion was that Nokia had to grow bigger. At this time the situation in consumer electronics in Europe had also changed. Competition had become more intensive.
Philips, the biggest TV manufacturer in Europe, with a market share of 25 per cent, acquired an American ? rm and began to think more globally. Thompson, the second biggest TV manufacturer in Europe, with a market share of 20 per cent, acquired two main competitors in the USA and England. Economies of scale through mass production were now considered as very important. The Salora and Luxor factories had a capacity of only 400,000 TV sets each. Nokia was number three in Europe, but still had only 5 per cent market share.
The opinion within Nokia was that a volume of 2 million TV sets per ear was needed to be competitive with both Philips and Thompson, and the Japanese and Korean competitors. In the late 1980s, the price competition became tougher in the European consumer electronics markets because of a more aggressive penetration from Far Eastern competitors. It was also expected that the ? xed R&D costs would rise, which implied that there was going to be a volume advantage regarding R&D too.
THE ACQUISITION OF OCEANIC
Nokia’s pro tability in consumer electronics was good, especially in 1987, and it had passed Philips in market shares in all Nordic markets. In April 1987 the Nokia board of directors approved the strategic plan to acquire European TV brands. The plan was to acquire a French and a German brand, and a factory in either of these two countries. There were negotiations with different sellers, including the French company Oceanic which was for sale. Personal relationships between Nokia top management and the owner of Oceanic, the Swedish Electrolux Group, resulted in a rapid acquisition of Oceanic. Electrolux wanted to divest this business, which had no synergy with its core know-how. Through the acquisition of Oceanic, Nokia got inside the EC with the production of TV sets.
Furthermore, Nokia acquired a signi? cant market share in the French market, which was rather closed and dif? cult for an outsider to penetrate. 2 Originally, the Eureka programme was launched to serve as a European complement to the Strategic Defense Initiative launched by the Reagan administration in the United States. Another reason was that previously launched European technology development programmes were considered too bureaucratic, too slow or too narrowly de ned.
The pre-acquisition phase took less than three months and only four meetings were needed. Immediately after the acquisition, the integration process between Salora, Luxor and Oceanic was started. Oceanic had a turnover of 600 million FIM, mainly in colour TVs, and 800 employees. Oceanic’s market share of consumer electronics in France was just below 10 per cent, with the Oceanic and Sonolor brands. The strategy was to keep the French production unit apart from the other factories because of differences in standards, while accounting systems, logistics and marketing should be integrated.
The French local managers were trusted by the Finnish management and retained. The next step in the conquest of European markets was to look for other brands. Nokia was interested in Thompson’s German brands Saba, Nordwede and Telefunken. According to Heikki Koskinen, who headed the negotiations, an agreement was close for one of the brands, when the Standard Electric Lorenz possibility emerged.
NOKIA DOUBLES ITS TV PRODUCTION: THE ACQUISITION OF STANDARD ELECTRIC LORENZ
At this time, an internal struggle for power was going on between future candidates for the top position in the Nokia corporation. Top managers were traditionally recruited internally, and in 1985 a new manager for industrial electronics was appointed, Timo Koski, after close internal competition. He was seen as the probable next chief executive of? cer of Nokia. However, the earlier successful president of Salora, Antti Lagerroos, now heading the consumer electronics businesses in Nokia, had strong personal ambitions to advance to the very top of Nokia. This thirst for power became a driving force behind the next acquisition.
Parallel to Heikki Koskinen’s negotiations with Thompson, Antti Lagerroos made the initial analysis that resulted in his suggestion to acquire a very big competitor, Standard Electric Lorenz (SEL) in the former West Germany. Lagerroos then used the freedom of action given to him by Kari Kairamo, and started to negotiate with SEL and its owners on his own, partly assisted by the director of technology in Nokia. Almost at the same time, Timo Koski acquired the whole personal computer and information systems business of the Ericsson Group in Sweden – an acquisition of the same size as SEL.
Nokia became the largest information technology company in Scandinavia. Ericsson’s large-scale production of terminal systems and established position in systems for commercial, industrial and banking sectors, together with Nokia’s intelligent workstations and retail systems, were expected to enhance the Nokia Group’s competitiveness in the information technology sector. The signi cantly enlarged division led by Timo Koski was named Nokia Data. Both Antti Lagerroos and Timo Koski had now extended their internal domains signi? antly in the struggle for further power in Nokia.
However, in 1987 Timo Koski suddenly died of a heart attack. The acquisition of SEL from the US conglomerate ITT was made early in 1988, just a couple of months after the Oceanic acquisition. The product on capacity increased from 1 million TV sets annually to almost 2. 5 million. The chief executive of? cer, Kari Kairamo, attached great importance to this acquisition. The opinion was that SEL completed Nokia’s consumer electronics business both technically and regionally. SEL was ahead of Nokia in digital TV technology.
And regionally Nokia now became strong not only in France, but also in German-speaking Europe (15 per cent market share) and even in southern Europe as SEL exported to Italy, France, Spain and Portugal. The net sales of SEL were FIM4. 9 billion in 1988, with an annual production of 1. 2 million colour TVs, 1. 7 million picture tubes and 350,000 video recorders. The main production facilities for SEL’s colour TV sets and video recorders were located near Bochum in the Ruhr region. The picture tube factory was located near Stuttgart, and the loudspeaker factory was in Bavaria.
SEL also had four other smaller production facilities in West Germany. The SEL acquisition included assembly plants in Spain and Portugal as well, and shares in joint ventures in Hungary, Malaysia and Italy. With the incorporation of SEL, Nokia’s position as Europe’s third largest colour TV manufacturer was strengthened.
POST-ACQUISITION INTEGRATION BECOMES PROBLEMATIC
In January 1988, Simo Vuorilehto, the chief operations of cer of Nokia, was of the opinion that all Nokia’s consumer electronics units should be consolidated within a wholly new division with its headquarters in Continental Europe. Signi? ant investments in upgrading and modernisation of production technology and logistics were needed in the new division that was formed, which was named Nokia Consumer Electronics.
The integration and co-ordination of Salora–Luxor, Oceanic and SEL started in February 1988 with the appointment of an integration group led by Antti Lagerroos. The group was working hard during spring 1988 with the aim of integrating administration and production in all four acquired consumer electronic units, a total of ten factories, within six months. The purpose was to be able to present an integrated structure for the new division in the summer of 1988.
But the timetable could not be met entirely. The chief executive of cer, Kari Kairamo, was worried that Nokia did not have enough internationally experienced personnel, and believed that many new managers were needed, especially in the consumer electronics business. This opinion was further strengthened by some analysis carried out by external consultants in early 1988. Furthermore, Antti Lagerroos could not implement the necessary changes fast enough and lost Kari Kairamo’s con dence to lead Nokia Consumer Electronics into Europe. Instead, he was appointed president of Nokia’s Mobile Phones (previously Mobira).
He soon wanted to merge Nokia Consumer Electronics and Nokia Mobile Phones, but did not get any support for that. Antti Lagerroos eventually left the Nokia Group in February 1990. In June 1988 a new president, Jacques Noels, was appointed for Nokia Consumer Electronics. Head hunters found him in France at Thompson – one of Nokia’s large competitors in consumer electronics. Before that he had been working for many years in European units of large US companies in the electronics industry. Jacques Noels had to start to organise the consumer electronics division from scratch, and at least half a year of integration was totally lost.
Furthermore, ten senior managers in SEL had left the company. Initially, Noels rented an of ce in Paris for three months and brought his secretary with him from Thompson. The rst task was to build a new management team with the right mixture of competence. A new head of ce for Nokia Consumer Electronics was established in Geneva (regarded as ‘neutral ground’) in order to facilitate further recruitment and the establishment of a truly international division. In 1989, Jacques Noels presented a new organisation structure for Nokia Consumer Electronics, more than one year after the latest acquisition.
During that time Nokia’s market share of TV sets had declined from 14 to 11 per cent in the European markets. Not only the consumer electronics business but the whole group showed weak results. The relations between the chairman of the Nokia board and the chief executive of cer, Kari Kairamo, became more and more strained. The external directors were expected to suggest some changes in the top management structure of Nokia. In this situation, Kari Kairamo suddenly died (suicide, according to the media) in December 1989.
After Kari Kairamo’s tragic death, Simo Vuorilehto became the new chief executive of er. According to him, the key factors in the consumer electronics strategy were marketing, design and production: We are not at all the kind of company that could develop semiconductors or picture tubes in the future. But we can be competitive and ahead of other competitors in marketing, design and production. In production we perhaps cannot be superior to our competitors, but we can at least be at the same level. We cannot develop everything ourselves, which was a mistake in the ?rst integration plans.
Heikki Koskinen, responsible for strategic planning in Jacques Noels’ new management team, emphasised similar competitive advantages of Nokia Consumer Electronics: Our strength is in rapid application of new technology. When technologies shift you have to forecast the trends and minimise the investment costs. Our competitive advantage is in the brain of the engineers. That is especially true in application issues. He had never fully understood the volume thinking behind the acquisition of SEL: The only advantage you reach by large-scale production is that you can control the material costs.
The manager in charge of export sales also held the opinion that too much emphasis had been put on production costs: I cannot understand that acquisitions are made based on production advantages. In our acquisitions there were no synergies between the brands. When you combine factories and brands you take away a large part of the turnover. I am astonished that Nokia had not made clear the future brand policy before the acquisitions. That was the greatest problem. Jacques Noels’ strategy was to become big in some niches, not in the whole market. Nokia should concentrate in high-quality and high-technology TV sets, with good pro? margins. According to him, the market share of the total market was therefore not as important.
The group had telecommunication, mobile phones, information systems, computers and consumer electronics, and more and more synergies were expected to emerge between these different business areas. The border between professional and consumer electronics was expected to disappear.
According to Jacques Noels, Nokia already had a strong technological capacity and good management resources. But he saw some disadvantages compared with the main competitors: I think they have a different position, because they have very strong brands. Telefunken is a much stronger brand than, for example, Graetz [an SEL brand]. They have also much stronger corporate brands, e. g. Philips compared to Nokia. Their strategy can be very different; they can let almost every brand have its own life. Grundig can have its own strategy, nobody has to know that it is owned by Philips.
A NEW ORGANISATION STRUCTURE AND CULTURE
Jacques Noels wanted strong functional centralisation and stressed the importance of a competent and powerful management team. This was the rst priority because the management team was seen as the motor of the organisation. But it took time to put together the new team. Both old and new managers were tested by external consultants. Eventually, about 35 people were working at the head of ce in Geneva. All decisions concerning production, R&D and marketing were made there. Finance and strategic planning were centralised as well.
All acquired companies became pure production plants, separated from the sales and marketing activities, but with some R&D activities decentralised to these plants. Jacques Noels especially emphasised the connection and co-operation between R&D and marketing: We have regrouped the marketing and R&D centres so that the head of marketing and the head of R&D work side by side in Geneva, because we believe that they have to work closely together on new models. Production is only how to manufacture as cheap as possible, when the products have been developed.
He highlighted the cultural dif culties in integrating the different units and nationalities. A new integrated culture for Nokia Consumer Electronics needed to be built on new management principles, but it had to emerge over several years. The tools for cultural integration were an international management group, circulation of leaders between countries, and a ‘Euro-manager’ programme. Young and recently employed graduates from all countries involved were taken into this Euro-manager programme, developed in 1989–90.
The creation of this new pan-European culture was planned to continue after 1990 for another three to ? ve years. But Jacques Noels did not have an easy task in seeking to create a ‘Europeanised’ business unit out of Nokia Consumer Electronics: If you make two major acquisitions in three months, you get many problems regarding product strategy; sales channels; general management, etc. There is nothing that works by itself. You have to struggle and that is what we did. First we worked out a product strategy in order to concentrate our R&D efforts. Then, from the middle of 1989, we put a lot of efforts in new brand, sales and marketing policies.
MARKETING AND PRODUCTION STRATEGIES WITHIN NOKIA CONSUMER ELECTRONICS
In 1989 Nokia Consumer Electronics launched a universal brand, ITT–Nokia, that would be positioned as a middle-range product. The ITT–Nokia brand would then be combined with one or two other and more local Nokia brands in each local market, including a ‘high-end’ brand representing higher quality and/or more exclusive design. For the integration of product development and manufacturing, a ‘Euroline-concept’ was launched.
Nokia Consumer Electronics reduced the number of chassis from 25 to 10, and the goal was to come down to three or four product chassis. All R&D centres were supporting this product concept, but it was modi? ed in accordance with the country and the brand characteristics. The Exploring Corporate Strategy by Johnson, Scholes & Whittington 10 Nokia: The Consumer Electronics Business different centres were concentrated on different levels in the product range, from low-end to high-end chassis. The marketing strategy was to be achieved through an integrated sales, product and distribution strategy.
Marketing of the brands was the most important part. All acquired brands were local brands, and Nokia as a brand was unknown within the distribution channels. The problem after the acquisition of SEL was to convince the distribution channels that the brand ITT–Nokia had a future. The solution was to combine the innovation image of ITT and resource image of Nokia3 in this new brand ITT–Nokia, with the intention of later dropping ITT. There were many discussions and different opinions about the wisdom of using the Nokia name.
Many managers were sceptical about the possibilities of transferring the ITT image to the Nokia name. However, ITT–Nokia was introduced as the pan-European brand in the medium range; a modern brand with modern technology, which was going to compete with Philips. Salora was marketed as high-range brand, while the other brands were used as local brands. Jacques Noels stated: Our strategy is to have three brands per country. The major brand, in the beginning, has to be the established local brand. But this is short term. Gradually we are introducing Nokia as the major European brand.
But we want to do that gradually, not brutally. In all countries we are also supporting the original brand. That is why we support Luxor in Sweden, Salora in Finland, ITT–Nokia in Germany and Oceanic in France, and then gradually introduce Nokia as a complementary brand. A brand strategy with three brands means three different channels. The specialised independent retailers are very important. They want to have their local brands. Then we have the large specialised channels that are only selling electronics. Finally we have the supermarkets, big stores, they want to have one brand, one styling, easy to recognise.
Some managers were critical of using acquisition as a means of growth and also sceptical of the possibility of transferring the image of one brand to another. The brand Salora had a quite good image. Investigations by Nokia showed that Salora had some recognition in England, Italy, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland, and much more recognition than the new brand Nokia. Finally, Jacques Noels distinguished between three different production strategies: Today we have two or three complementary strategies. One is volume; it is clear that the volume in TV assembling is important.
We are working with that in Germany, where our Bochum plant is one of the largest in Europe; one million TV sets. The second strategy is to specialise, when a plant only produces one product and we can extend that product line. We are doing that in Salo where we are producing our high-end chassis. In Luxor we are producing all our decoders and satellites, and there we also have the technical expertise for these products. In those products the technical expertise is what makes the cost, not so much the production volume, but also how well and quickly we can introduce our products.
We have a factory in Portugal, where labour cost is an important factor. We are trying to rationalise our production by stage of the product life, labour cost, volume and engineering. Those are the four criteria and they give different answers for different products.
