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Well you don’t see me putting pen to paper a great deal but sometimes there are articles floating around on the sphere that get my blood pressure rising to what my doctor is prone to call an ‘unreasonable level for a man of your years/weight/physical condition’. Reading coverage of one of our competitor’s much hyped web pad event this week, I was surprised to see that, by revenue, they were claiming in their leader’s keynote to be “the largest mobile devices company in the world.”

I thought we should to set the record straight, with a true, “apples-to-apples”, comparison. Happily just as I was about to crunch some numbers, a few other folk started to notice as well. First there was Helsingin Sanomat, referring to these claims, in a story online at 10.45pm, who highlighted the reference and quoted our CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo saying that Nokia is the world’s biggest mobile device manufacturer, when you use a generally accepted and stable definition of mobile devices (i.e. not a laptop, etc). The paper then made a numbers comparison from October to December. Nokia’s devices and services business from Oct-Dec was shown as €8,18 billion while the claimants turnover for “newly defined” mobile devices was €7,25 billion.

Then the Financial Times picked up the comparison too.

The difference between the two companies is even larger if you use the more common measure: the number of devices sold. By that comparison, Nokia has been the largest mobile devices company in the world for a dozen consecutive years.

We all agree that size matters in business. It’s not everything, but it counts for a lot. It has allowed Nokia to spread mobile communications technology at ever more affordable prices to people in every corner of the world. As OPK said recently at CES, our devices “already have done more to improve lives at the base of society’s pyramid than perhaps any technology in history.” And I am proud of that, and I, like the rest of my colleagues don’t use the words ‘Connecting People’ lightly.

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