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E-book Kingdom of Nokia : How a Nation Served the Needs of One Company
The first global story concerns Finland’s entry to the world of global capitalism and the benefits of accommodating a huge international company. It also looks at the other side of the coin, a Nordic welfare state dependent on one field of technology and the special interests of one dominant actor with an Anglo-Saxon busi-ness mindset. In that context, ideas and argumentation associated with the welfare state have given way to a pro-market business discourse associated with neoliberal ideology (Poutanen 2019).According to the Etla economic research institute, as recently as 2008 Nokia produced by far the most value-added in the Finnish economy: 4.8 billion euros. Value-added is the total of profits, labour costs, depreciation costs and rent. Large corporations are more important to Finland than to neighbouring countries; Finland’s 20 largest export companies produce half of its exports, while in Sweden and Denmark the proportion is a third. Nokia’s value-added was twice as great as that of the financial group Nordea, which was second largest. Almost a quarter of Finnish corpora-tion tax was paid by Nokia. Just five years later, in 2013, Nokia’s name briefly disappeared from the top 10 list of the most valuable Finnish companies.Major corporations with a corresponding position have been Royal Dutch Shell in the Netherlands, Samsung in Korea and Gazprom in Russia, but they have not had the same influence on the real economy of their home countries. Everyone who lived the Nokia dream awoke to the harsh reality of its decline, as tens of thousands of jobs disappeared at Nokia and its subcontractors. Politicians have still to come to terms with the acute problem of restructuring, now that the state budget has lost the massive sup-port of a worldwide.
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