Sustainability is at the core of Nokia’s strategy, impacting everything from product design to supply chain management. Subho Mukherjee, Nokia’s Vice President & Global Head of Sustainability, discussed how the company is working to minimize emissions while maximizing efficiency. Through innovations in AI-powered network optimization, energy-efficient base stations, and sustainable manufacturing, Nokia aims to outpace rising energy demands—especially as AI continues to grow.
Nokia’s technologies support sustainability efforts across industries, including transportation, utilities, and data centers. With ambitious targets like decarbonizing operations by 2030 and achieving net-zero emissions by 2040, Nokia is driving meaningful change. Learn more about how Nokia is shaping a greener future—watch the full interview now!
Diana Goovaerts:
Subho, it's great to be here with you at the Nokia booth at MWC. Talk to me a little bit. I mean, I don't want to say greenwashing is a thing, but it is. So talk to me about what sustainability really means for Nokia.
Subho Mukherjee:
Thanks for having me here, Diana. I really appreciate the opportunity. Sustainability is core to Nokia's business strategy, our technology strategy, and our operations. So the way we look at sustainability is, what can it do for our customers in terms of improving our innovations, our value propositions, and our products? What can it do for our suppliers through a better, responsible supply chain? And what can it do for our shareholders through minimizing the risks that our shareholders are exposed to?
Diana Goovaerts:
So obviously you serve a lot of CSPs. Talk to me for a brief second about the role that CSPs have in this dynamic, when it comes to sustainability.
Subho Mukherjee:
There are two parts to the role of CSPs. The information and communication technology industries in which the CSPs are part of has a huge footprint in the emissions of the networks. 2% of world's emissions and 5% of electricity are consumed by the CSPs collectively around the world. This is an area where Nokia has been working for, I would say, decades, in terms of making sure that as radio network technology evolves from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G and into the next generation of 6G, we are being able to beat the growth of network capacity to the growth of the energy demands in the network. We have had silicon chipset innovation. We had software innovation, powered today by a lot of AI, as well as system and architecture innovation. We are doubling down on that path to make sure that our [inaudible 00:01:47] emissions and the CSPs network emissions are the lowest as possible.
What I would also highlight is the CSP network, the telecom network, also has a handprint impact on many other industries. So think about the network impacts on transportation sector, power utilities, ports, mines. These sectors are some of the biggest emitting sectors in the world. So what the telecom networks can do is not just about the telecom networks that are in our mobile devices or in our IoT devices, but the transformational impact in, say, clean energy transformation in oil and gas industry, sustainable transportation in the aviation industry or the ports or the logistics industry. So I'm very excited about the opportunity of Nokia being able to cater to telecom industry to build sustainable networks, but also to lead these other industries, including, of course, increasingly the data center industry, to build sustainable networks.
Diana Goovaerts:
So I heard you say that Nokia is working to outpace the rising consumption of energy. This is probably going to become more acute with AI in the picture now. So talk to me about how this effort, this sustainability effort, impacts the way you design your products. What goes into that thought process? What kind of products does it impact?
Subho Mukherjee:
As I said, sustainability is built into companies' strategy. It really means breaking it down to every employee of Nokia about how they can contribute. So our smart R&D engineers who are looking at designing these products are building in what is called design for environment in the design principles. They look at what's the best silicon design they can do, the chipset design. They're looking at what's the best software architecture that can help doing a lot of the autonomous operations using AI.
In Mobile World Congress, for example, we are looking at our partner Google's booth. We have a AI-powered new platform, which is showing how consumers can, on their Android device, look at better visibility of the energy consumption of their applications. Here at Nokia Booth, we are looking at, what's the best energy-efficient base stations we can bring? We are showing how the telecom operators can monetize their energy asset with virtual power plants and things like that. So there is a lot of product innovation that has gone in across our radio, optical, IP products, as well as [inaudible 00:04:11] products.
What things are also increasingly evolving is beyond the product innovation, it's also about how you manufacture these products, how you manage your supply chain. So we have a pretty steep target for our own factories as well as our final assembly suppliers to get to complete decarbonization by end of this decade. We have also strong targets. We want to reduce 73% of our logistics emission by 2030. We are working very hard. Nokia has operations in 120 countries. We are working very hard in across these countries, the supply chain networks and how to reduce those logistics emissions. So in my view, telecom networks, enterprise networks, data center networks, all of these things require strong innovation in product design. Our new product evolution in the optical area for data center networking, including our recent acquisition of Infinera, all of those things need to be put under this banner, and at the same time how we run operations and logistics and manufacturing, all of those things coming together to help contribute our net-zero roadmap, which is by 2040.
Diana Goovaerts:
So you beat me to my question about your net-zero roadmap, so I'll leave you with one simple lightning round question. Are you going to hit that goal?
Subho Mukherjee:
We will walk the hardest we can to make to that goal, not only within Nokia, but also with our suppliers and our customers. All I can tell you is this is core to Nokia's value proposition. This is core to how our employees design and operate. And we have a very strong governance year by year, not waking up in 2039 about this. And we are working hard to make sure we are on the right track to that goal.
Diana Goovaerts:
Well, we will keep track of your progress. Thank you so much for your time.
Subho Mukherjee:
Thanks for the opportunity, Diana.