In electronics, brands have a track record of reinventing themselves, and of the products that made them household names and returning in a different avatar. Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry and Finnish telecom giant Nokia were once the world's biggest mobile phone makers. Today most of its money selling telecom and networking equipment. IBM, which popularised the personal computer, exited PCs two decades ago and now sells Al and enterprise software, hybrid cloud and high-end consulting.
These companies show reinvention after the product that made them disappears - primarily for failing to capitalise on changing consumer trends - is less visible technologies such as software, patents, networks or enterprise infrastructure.
Samsung, for instance, began as a trading company dealing in dried fish and groceries before trading cards before moving into video games and handheld devices. Nintendo spent much of its early history making playing cards.
So how do they pull turnarounds? According to Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, experts have de-clining older. "More value is destroyed around the world by companies not acting their age... If I give you a facelift, you can be young again. And sometimes companies keep buying into this notion over and over," he says.
At its peak, BlackBerry was one of the defining brands of the smartphone era, known for its physical QWERTY keyboard and secure messaging services. But the arrival of Apple's iPhone and Android smartphones rapidly eroded its position. BlackBerry stopped effectively ending its life as a consumer hardware manufacturer. The company that remains is markedly different, now focused on QNX, its operating system used in cars and other embedded systems, and secure communications and business software.
Nokia underwent an even more dramatic change. The company dominated global telephone sales in the 2000s but struggled with the transition to smartphones. In 2014, it completed the sale of substantially all its handset business to Microsoft. What remained was primarily a telecommunications infrastructure company. Nokia bolstered its position through its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, and more recently bought optical networking company Infinera. Its infrastructure and enterprise entry into the Al boom - its networking equipment connects servers, data centres and increasingly large clusters of Al chips - has made cloud services one of its strategic priorities, arguing that rapid construction of data centres will increase demand for high-capacity optical anc networks.
The lesson: hardware dies, platforms live. The logo stays, the business model flips.