What if you bought Nokia in 1995?
World · Finland. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play1.7× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Nokia at the start of 1995 would be worth about $1,667 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Nokia began in 1865 as a Finnish paper mill and spent the 20th century making rubber boots, cables and televisions before betting everything on mobile phones. It worked: by 1998 Nokia was the world's largest handset maker, and during the 2000 bubble it became Europe's most valuable company, its shares up about fifteenfold in five years. It accounted for a large share of Finland's stock market and exports.
Its phones kept selling in huge volumes after the dot-com crash, but the 2007 iPhone and then Google's Android changed what phones were. Nokia's Symbian software struggled to keep up. In 2011 new CEO Stephen Elop bet on Microsoft's Windows Phone, which never caught on, and in 2014 Nokia sold its handset business to Microsoft. What remained was a network equipment company, expanded by buying out Siemens' stake in their joint venture and acquiring Alcatel-Lucent in 2016. In 2021 it briefly became a meme stock. From 2000, the shares have lost roughly nine tenths of their value.
The lesson: Market dominance in a fast-changing technology can disappear within a few years, so a leader's past market share is no protection against a platform shift.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $3.00 | $1,667 | $14,783 | 1.7× |
| 2000 | $45.00 | $111 | $4,626 | 0.1× |
| 2003 | $15.00 | $333 | $7,727 | 0.3× |
| 2005 | $16.00 | $312 | $5,763 | 0.3× |
| 2007 | $20.00 | $250 | $4,789 | 0.2× |
| 2008 | $38.00 | $132 | $4,626 | 0.1× |
| 2010 | $13.00 | $385 | $6,071 | 0.4× |
| 2012 | $4.80 | $1,042 | $5,312 | 1.0× |
| 2015 | $8.00 | $625 | $3,301 | 0.6× |
| 2018 | $4.70 | $1,064 | $2,519 | 1.1× |
| 2020 | $3.70 | $1,351 | $2,092 | 1.4× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $1,667. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
On this day
- 11 February 2011: Nokia bets the company on Microsoft
- 10 September 2010: Nokia hires Stephen Elop from Microsoft
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Nokia is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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