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Nokia’s current CEO, Pekka Lundmark, is stepping down from the role after five years in the role
This week, Nokia has announced that it has appointed Intel’s head of the data centre and artificial intelligence group, Justin Hotard, to replace their outgoing CEO Pekka Lundmark.
Hotard will formally take over the role on April 1.
Word that Nokia’s board was looking to replace Lundmark first began circulating in September last year, with reports suggesting that Nokia had approached numerous candidates to fill his shoes.
At the time, both Lundmark and Nokia dismissed these claims.
Lundmark has served as CEO for Nokia since 2020. He took over the business four years after Nokia’s acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, at a time when the company’s share price was falling and the battle for 5G market share was just beginning. After recovering from his predecessor’s ill-fated choice of Intel’s 5G chips, Lundmark gradually turned Nokia back onto the path of 5G stability, but much of the financial damage had already been done.
As such, Lundmark’s tenure at Nokia has focussed on cost-cutting measures, as well as pushing the company towards the data centre, private wireless, and industrial Edge segments with mixed success.
This focus on data centres appears to be at the heart of the board’s choice to appoint Hotard, who has led Intel’s data centre unit since last January.
Commenting on the announcement, Nokia’s chair Sari Baldauf described Hotard as having “a strong track record of accelerating growth in technology companies along with vast expertise in AI and data centre markets, which are critical areas for Nokia’s future growth.”
Last year, Nokia moved to acquire optical networking specialist Infinera for $2.3 billion, a move that analysts suggested would put the company to better profit from the boom in AI data centre investment currently taking place worldwide.
“It is not just the connectivity inside the data centre, but the connectivity across data centres. I think the will be opportunities in mobile networks as well. I look forward to seeing that [the Infinera acquisition] close, ad working with the Nokia team to ensure we successfully integrate the acquisition and maximise value capture,” said Hotard in a streamed press conference.
“As we look at the opportunity in AI, this gives us a great opportunity to differentiate as we move into the hyperscaler customers and the emerging neo-cloud customers that are coming up. I think there is a tremendous opportunity for us on a global basis to win it.”
The Infinera acquisition is expected to close later this quarter.
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