Styf Sjöman (pictured) replaces Kathrin Buvac, though Buvac continues in the role of president of Nokia Enterprise and both are members of the company’s group leadership team.
She said: “With its broad portfolio and innovative technology, Nokia is well positioned to help its customers realize the full potential of 5G, and I look forward to being part of further strengthening Nokia in this 5G journey.”
Styf Sjöman worked for Ericsson for eight years until 1997, based in Hong Kong, Spain, Netherlands and the US. After a spell with other companies she returned to Ericsson in 2004, initially based in Beijing as general manager of service layer and systems integration.
She became TIM’s head of group engineering in Rome and head of the Telecom Italia group labs in 2015, where she helped to deploy deploy Huawei’s CloudRAN technology in Palermo. She moved to Telia in Stockholm in 2017. Until the move to Nokia she was vice president and deputy head of global services and operations, and head of the company’s networks group. There, Capacity reported two years ago, the company launched what it claimed to be the first public 5G network use cases in Europe as part of a project in Estonia with Ericsson and Intel.
According to a Telia blog, she took part in the company’s 5G pre-commercial launch in Finland. “This was a fantastic event as result of much hard work by many brilliant colleagues,” she wrote. One of Telia’s customers, a large Finnish forestry company, started to use augmented reality on 5G, in collaboration with Telia. “This is what we strive for, to create new value propositions to our customers through our technology leadership.”
Rajeev Suri, president and CEO of Nokia, said: “We are delighted to welcome Gabriela to Nokia at a pivotal moment in our 5G journey. She brings a wealth of international knowledge and a deep understanding of our industry, its customers and technologies … Her insight will be critical in refining our strategy for the future.”
Styf Sjöman grew up in Mexico, the US, the former Czechoslovakia and Sweden. She studied basic law, political science and international relations at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and holds an MBA from Durham University in the UK.
Buvac became Nokia’s chief strategy officer in January 2014, and at the beginning of this year became additionally president of Nokia Enterprise. She hands over the strategy role to Styf Sjöman on 1 December.
