Salo, Our Last Rotary Destination

Posted by Patti Keillor

Today was our first morning in Salo, our last stop on this trip. Salo is known as the headquarters of the Nokia Corporation. Jari, a local Rotary member, gave us a presentation tour and lunch. We learned many interesting things about the cell phone company, including the fact that they don't refer to their products as phones, but rather "devices" because today's phone is so much more than a phone.

Nokia orginally began in Tampere, Finland in 1865 and moved to Nokia, Finland a few years later. The company has worn many hats over the years, but orginally started selling wood products, then rubber boots and tires. They started in the phone industry in 1945 when the government asked the company to develop a radio transmitter for military usage. In the 1970's Nokia first began making mobile phones. Today Nokia is manufactured in 9 countries, research and development takes place in 10 countries and they sell their devices in more than 150 countries.

The corporation on a whole has 120,000 employees, about 3,000 in Salo. Salo is more of an operations hub, although it does have a factory, it is the smallest factory in the corporation. It is more economical for the company to manufacture the phones in other countries due to shipping costs.

In 2007 Nokia made 437 million devices and had a net sales of 51,058 Million Euros. Nokia is the #1 cell phone in the whole world. The sales breakdown includes 39% of Europe, 22% Asia Pacific, 13% China, 14% Middle East and only 4% in the US. Nokia has 40% of the market share followed by Samsung at 14%, Motorola at 12%, Sony Ericsson at 9%, LG at 7% and others at 18% (this includes the i phone which apparently has only about 1% of the market.) Nokia has clearly done a good job at understanding many different types of cultures and markets in this very global business.

After our Nokia visit we headed to the Salo Art Museum. The Salo Art Museum was an old railcar storage facility that was renovated to become an art museum. There was a wonderful display by Kuutti Lavenen, a Finnish artist whose interest seemed to be with the human form, faces and religious figures. He used several different mediums including charcoal, paint, pastels and used many different canvases included some with plywood.

We then went to the University of Turku's Salo campus of applied sciences. We met with Paive and she told us more about the Finnish college system. We were interested to learn that there were a variety of vocational degrees including a popular nursing degree all taught in English which has 10% international students.

To cap off our fantastic day, we all headed to a Rotary meeting and our farewell dinner with the Salo club. Everyone throughout our entire journey has been so generous and wonderful hosts and we all got the chance to express this at our farewell dinner. Kyosti, the GSE coordinator and Matti, the district governor where there, and we enjoyed spending more time in their company.

We had a fantastic evening and we were also sad to think that our trip will soon be over. We are all excited to tell our families, friends and Rotary Clubs in Minnesota about how wonderful Finland is, especially the Finnish people!