There is an approximately one-in-three chance that the next person you see holding a cell phone against the side of their head will be speaking into a Nokia product. Such is the level of worldwide market penetration reaching 35.3 percent of the 97 million phones sold in the first quarter of this year-of one of the world's leading telecommunications companies.

Like many a modern giant, Nokia has humble origins. In 1865, an engineer named Fredrik Idestam began manufacturing paper in a wood pulp mill he built by a river in southern Finland. He called the company Nokia, which also became the name of the town that gradually grew up around the mill as Idestam's business expanded into the export market.

Although the town still exists, the modern company no longer has a presence there. The Nokia Group was formed in 1967 as a result of a merger between the Finnish Rubber Works, which had also started life in the town of Nokia, and the Finnish Cable Works. The latter, based in Helsinki, had sown the seeds of the Group's future success when it moved into electronics in the early 1960s.

Nokia's breathtaking success lies in its past attentiveness to the potential of the digital age. It began developing its DX 200 digital switch more than twenty-five years ago, and from the start played a major role in the Global System for Mobile Communications that was set up to standardize mobile phone networks at the end of the 1980s.

你碰到的下一个拿手机的人大约有三分之一的几率是在对着诺基亚手机讲话。这就是诺基亚进入全球市场的水平：今年第一季度售出的手机总数为九千七百万台，市场占有率高达35.3%，是世界电讯传播类公司的龙头之一。

和许多现代巨型企业一样，诺基亚起家时也很卑微。1865年，一位名叫弗兰德里克·艾德斯塔姆（Fredrik Idestam）的工程师，在芬兰南部一条河的河边建起一个纸浆厂，从事造纸业。他为这家公司取名为诺基亚， 随着艾德斯塔姆事业拓展到出口市场，公司逐渐成长起来，后来那个城市的 名字也取为诺基亚。

这个城市现今依然存在，但这家现代产业公司已不复存在。诺基亚集团成立于1967年，由芬兰橡胶及电缆制造业两家合并而成，前者最初也建在诺基亚城。后者的总部设在赫尔辛基，60年代初期转向发展电子业，从而为该集团未来的成功播下了种子。

诺基亚惊人的成就归功于其昔日的敏锐观察，预见到数字时代的无穷潜力。早在25年前，它就开始发展DX 200数码交换机，从此开始主导全球移动通讯系统，该系统是在80年代末期为实现移动电话网络系统的标准化而建立的。