Well, Nokia has been right before, so perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. But it’s not about just being able to see someone you’re talking to on a screen — over-rated, he agrees, otherwise we’d be doing this interview by videolink. In fact, there is no single “killer application” that’s going to persuade us all to make the switch. No, the future is about all the different ways we can use the new technology to interact with others, access data, make life easier, do things faster, gain comfort. A few early adopters of “3G” (the next-generation system that allows you to do much of the above) are already experiencing it. Once it’s more easily available, cheap enough for the rest of us and works reliably, we will all pile in.
“So with this GPS,” he waves his black box around, “I have service on my phone that offers full road guidance anywhere in the world. I just put our address in today and I get maps, and driving instructions.”
But most people don’t need to make mad dashes across foreign cities? “No, but most people in the course of one week do go somewhere they haven’t been, they go round, searching in streets or whatever. Now they don’t have to worry, they just walk or drive with this. It’s really for the normal routines of normal people.”
And sitting behind a vast meeting table, covered with his various phones and gadgets, on one of those whistlestop city tours that multinational bosses have to undertake, Vanjoki is very plausible.
Trained as an actuary but with a background in medical-equipment sales at 3M, where he worked in America, Belgium and Germany, he has been at Nokia for nearly 15 years, part of a senior management team (mainly Finnish) that has barely changed under Ollila. Instead, every so often, Ollila moves everyone round in a bout of executive musical chairs.
“He likes to test us to the fringes of our capability,” says Vanjoki with a grin. Hence the 100% tie clip. “I tell him, when it reads 98%, then you’ve got to worry.”
It was this approach that fuelled Nokia’s transformation from an ailing electronics firm into a global leviathan (50,000 employees, 2,000 in Britain) that bestrides the handset market and dominates the Finnish economy.
That was not the first time Nokia had transformed itself. Created a century and a half ago, it can trace its roots through forestry, paper products, rubber goods, power cables and electronics — nor, you suspect, will it be the last.
Its radical reorganisation five months ago indicates where it wants to go next: away from selling ordinary mobile phones, fast becoming a commodity product, towards launching more innovative items, persuading consumers to trade up.
Hence the significance of Vanjoki’s multimedia division, which is being given huge backing to define how convergence — the coming together of previously separate technologies like phone, camera, television and computer — will play out for consumers. Another division will do the same for business users. It could be make-or-break, pitching Nokia against tough competitors such as Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Nintendo. Some analysts think Nokia’s best years may now be behind it.
Not Vanjoki, of course. He infuses about the roll-out of the firm’s N-Gage online gaming console/phone (price: up to £230), which has sold 1,000 units a day in Britain since launch, and about plans to launch a similar-looking multimedia phone this summer. He holds up a prototype, the Nokia 7700, a flat semi-saucer with button-edged screen, which he is already using.
These innovations will be a huge risk for the firm — many experts think, for example, that Nokia will never hit its global target of 9m units in two years for N-Gage at current prices. It needs network operators to subsidise it. Nor does everyone believe operators will automatically back multimedia phones, though Vanjoki says Nokia has no intention of abandoning the basic handset market.
But he faces a tough challenge, especially as he has promised to get multimedia into the black by December. For an ambitious executive, it could be career-denting. Did he want the job? “I was asked and I was excited, because it’s a dream job, I get to create things that weren’t there before. But it’s damn difficult because you are going into the unknown.”
And personal ambition is something, he says, that the team at Nokia have always put to one side, which is why they have managed to stay together so long. “We are not competitive with each other. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but most of us went through the Boy Scout movement” — which is particularly strong in Finland — “we understand the strengths and weaknesses of everyone in the team, and we have developed an open culture.”
That, he says, combined with the decision to shear off other interests to concentrate on mobile-phone technology, and the headstart the firm had, being based in Scandinavia (where the first popular mobile networks were set up), accounts for Nokia’s extraordinary rise.
Vanjoki himself, whose father was a Volkswagen importer and whose brother works for Shell, could have worked for any number of big firms, but liked the mentality at Nokia. Those who know him in Britain say he is more expressive, less dour than most Finnish managers, and he uses that as an advantage.
“For a Finn he is very animated,” says one who has known him for a decade, “he talks in stories and never descends into technology. And he has a pull about him that tends to drag people along in the same direction.”
There is also a determination that can take people aback. His great hobby is basketball, and he has coached teams in his spare time for nearly 30 years, he says. He loves it so much that when he came across a teenage prodigy living in the far north of Finland, he offered to adopt the boy, and bring him into his own family, so that he would have the chance to play regularly.
And so his club would win? Vanjoki looks rather shocked. “No, the most important thing is that he becomes a good, educated citizen.” Then he smiles. “But yes, I think we have a good chance of winning the Finnish championship this year.”
And does he still ride his motorbike? He winces. Receiving that huge fine two years ago was not a world record he wanted to hold. “I was just so embarrassed because of the system in Finland,” he says, “and because I was not considering myself such an unbelievable violater of law. Today I can laugh at it.”
Then he puts on a forced smile before adding: “Fortunately people know me for something else, too.”
