New Nokia chairman defends strategy Nokia's new chairman said that the turnround strategy would remain unchanged under his leadership even as the struggling Finnish mobile phone maker faced a crowd of angry investors at its annual general meeting. The handset maker was compared to the Titanic, a Greek tragedy and a sinister version of the Snow White fairytale where the princess stays asleep forever, all by shareholders upset by the sharp decline in the share price this year. "The current situation is close to catastrophe," said individual shareholder Pekka Jaakkola to Stephen Elop, the chief executive at the meeting in Helsinki on Thursday. We know that Nokia is fighting against the tide. The products are not popular. Nokia has been left behind in the fast-moving high-end smartphone market in recent years dominated by Apple and phones using Google's Android operating system, but is attempting to make a late-break into this lucrative market with its new range of Lumia products launched last year with a Windows operating system. This year the company has already faced a profit warning, the loss of its investment grade status by two rating agencies and a 31 per cent decline in its share price. But the new chairman Risto Siilasmaa said the company's turnround strategy - which includes substantial job layoffs - was on track. "I don't think any new change is required as we are going through a transformation period already," he said. I am confident that Nokia has the right team, right strategy and now increasingly also the right products. Mr Elop also produced a robust defence of the company's strategy over the past year, attempting to remind investors that Nokia - which started over 100 years ago as a pulp maker, graduating to making rubber boots and then into consumer electronics - has reinvented itself many times and could do so again. Mr Elop made the case that the "burning platform" metaphor he used to describe the company was not longer apt, saying that Nokia was now more like Finnish long-distance runner Lasse Virén who tripped during a race in 1972 but still won in the end. "Like Virén we are off the grass, on the track and running again," he said. Many investors appeared unconvinced, favouring elaborate metaphors to drive home this dissatisfaction the company's progress. Another individual investor, Raimo Selin, compared management to the knight in the Snow White fairytale who instead of saving the princess with a kiss "just feeds her more poisoned apples." Despite the visible anger in the room there was little indication of a brewing revolt from the major shareholders as it was mostly the smaller individual investors from Finland asking the difficult questions.