Prior to joining
Nokia in 1985, Ollila worked for eight years in corporate banking at
Citibank's London and Helsinki offices, and when he joined Nokia his tasks involved international investment deals. A year later, in 1986, Ollila was head of finance during Nokia's renewal under then CEO
Kari Kairamo. He was appointed as chief of the mobile phones section in 1990, and CEO two years later in 1992. When Ollila first came to power, the company had suffered from internal disputes and had a financial crisis of a number of years. As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets. In 1999, Ollila considered taking part in the Finnish presidential election, following a request from
Sauli Niinistö, a member of the
National Coalition Party, who was at that time Finnish finance minister and who 12 years later became President of Finland himself. This despite that Ollila belongs to a different party, the
Finnish Centre party, which he has been involved with since his activities in student politics at the University of Helsinki. He was replaced by
Risto Siilasmaa. Ollila said in a February 2011 interview with Finnish broadcaster
Yle that he supported the Nokia-
Microsoft partnership initiated by the CEO,
Stephen Elop, and predicted the company's fortunes will strongly recover. In a book published in September 2018 by Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa and presented to the
Helsingin Sanomat, Ollila's leadership style was strongly criticised and Siilasmaa revealed that the two had fallen out in 2010 (Siilasmaa was a Nokia board member from 2008). Siilasmaa also claims that he believes Ollila played a part in the company's downfall. In response, Ollila claimed that this was exaggerated and not true. Ollila was chairman of the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (
ETLA), the most reputed economic and social studies think tank in Finland. Between 2005 and 2009, he was chairman of the
European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). Ollila is the first non-Dutch or non-British person to be the chairman of Shell. He is also the first chairman chosen for this multinational corporation in its new corporate form of
Royal Dutch Shell. In October 2014, it was announced that he would be succeeded in May 2015 by the American
Charles O. Holliday. Ollila has been a board member in a number of companies, including
Ford Motor Company (2000–2008). Ollila was the chairman of the Finnish mining and metallurgy company
Outokumpu from 2013 until 2018.
Others Ollila is a member of the steering committee at the
Bilderberg Group. He participated in the 1994 conference and in every Bilderberg conference between 1997 and 2014. == Energy ==