Nokia's Market Value Exceeds $60 Billion, Up Over 60% This Year
Recently, Nokia's stock price reached a 16-year high, with its market value exceeding $60 billion (over 400 billion yuan). The former mobile phone market giant, after more than a decade of leaving the mobile phone business, has completed a stunning comeback as a leader in communications and AI infrastructure, with a year-to-date increase of over 60%.
Today's Nokia is no longer focused on mobile phone business, but has transformed into the world's second-largest telecom equipment vendor, holding a core position in 5G patents, optical communications, and computing power networks.
The company holds a large number of core 5G patents, and its optical communication equipment share ranks among the top in the world, providing network infrastructure for more than 130 countries globally. Most mainstream cloud service providers in North America adopt its optical transmission solutions.
The core driving force behind this round of market value surge comes from the explosive growth in demand for optical communications driven by the AI computing power boom, as well as its deep partnership with NVIDIA.
In October 2025, NVIDIA made a strategic investment of $1 billion, and the two companies cooperated on AI-RAN intelligent base stations, upgrading communication networks into edge computing scheduling nodes, directly opening up growth space in the AI era.
With optical modules, data center interconnection, and 5G-A/6G technology layout, Nokia has become a key builder of the AI era's computing power highway.
Nokia was once the absolute dominant player in the feature phone era, peaking at over 40% of the global mobile phone market share, with a market value once reaching $162.3 billion. Its classic model, the 1100, has accumulated sales of over 250 million units, and the concept of technology for people has been deeply rooted in people's hearts.
At that time, Nokia was known for its durability, long battery life, and stable signal, and was synonymous with reliable mobile phones in the minds of global consumers.
In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone, and the smartphone wave struck, and Nokia's crisis quietly arrived.
Management made strategic misjudgments, clinging to the outdated Symbian system, which was bloated with code and severely fragmented versions. In 2009, there were as many as 57 incompatible versions, and the application ecosystem was extremely weak. In 2010, the Symbian store had only 3,000 applications, while Android had exceeded 100,000.
Nokia rejected Google's Android cooperation invitation and insisted on independently developing the MeeGo system, but repeatedly missed the transformation window due to internal friction.
In 2011, Nokia bet everything on a partnership with Microsoft, fully embracing the Windows Phone system, abandoning Symbian and MeeGo.
However, the WP system had obvious shortcomings in its ecosystem, with insufficient application numbers and lagging mainstream adaptation. Nokia's R&D cycle was forced to be extended, and the competitiveness of its new machines was insufficient.
In 2012, Nokia's mobile phone business suffered a huge loss of 1.07 billion euros, and its market share plummeted to less than 5%.
In 2013, Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft for 5.44 billion euros, officially ending its mobile phone empire.