Video: Meet the ex-Nokians leading #HMD Global (@baidunokibar)

Stipe | 31/03/2017 | Nokia, Phones | 10 Comments

Nokibar, the trusted source for many Nokia information coming from China, published a YouTube video of HMD Global’s team introducing themselves to the Chinese media, probably at the Nokia 6 launch event in January.

The first one is Juho Sarvikas, Chief Product Officer at HMD Global. He worked at Nokia from 2006, at later joined Microsoft with the sales of the Devices & Services unit. Some of the phones he worked on are the Nokia E61i and the Nokia E66. You can find more about Juho’s role at Nokia and Microsft here. He is also profiled on the official HMD webpage here.

Next was Arto Nummela, the CEO of HMD Global. He spent almost 15 years at Nokia, and almost 2 at Microsoft, according to his LinkedIn profile. In the video, he said that he joined Nokia in early 90s. He was the vice manager in product development, and later as the VP of Sales and Marketing in Asia and Africa. His HMD page can be found here.

Few Chinese members of the team introduced themselves, too, but unfortunately we didn’t catch their names since we do not know Chinese. I assume they work for Nokia or now HMD China, and I caught that one of them worked on Nokia X, technically the first Android smartphone with the Nokia logo introduced in 2014.

Next up we have Mikko Kahlos, General Manager Products at HMD Global. He joined Nokia in 2007 in the role of product manager. He led the development of phones like the Nokia 5230, 5800 Xpress Music and the Lumia 800. More about Mikko can be found on his LinkedIn profile.

The one who got the biggest applause was Raun Forsyth, HMD’s Head of Design. Raun worked for Nokia since 2007 in the “Advanced Design” team, and later joined Microsoft in the same role. Raun leads a team of about 15 designers that are responsible for Nokia-branded products. Raun can be found on LinkedIn here. He is also the main figure in HMD’s design video, where sketches of an unknown device were filmed. Take a look at the design video down below.

There are more members of the team that were introduced so I encourage everyone who wants to learn more about the people behind HMD to watch Nokibar’s video down below.

For me personally, the most interesting figure is Raun Forsyth, for the simple reason that the introduced Nokia phones like the 3, 5 and 6 are smart designed, with durability as the No.1 priority. He worked for almost 10 years on advanced design in mobile, so he surely knows how the mobile design industry will develop, and is developing. We see that the “all screen” phones like the LG G6 and Galaxy S8 are becoming the new industry standard, and we expect HMD to follow such trend. Maybe not as radically as the Galaxy S8 or the Xiaomi Mi Max, but surely with a great screen to body ratio that would not sacrifice the phone’s durability, like what we saw on the Nokia 6, named as the tank. Take a look at a “design card” signed by Raun Forsyth.