343.

Brand Stories: ALEMAR'S "The Biggest and Most Modern Book

Store in the Far East", 1945

THE SIBALS, Founders of ALEMAR'S, 1945

When couple Dr. Ernesto and Alegria Sibal started selling American books from a one-table store in 1945, little did they know
that their business would grow into “the biggest and most modern bookstore in the Far East” in the 50s and 60s. Their bookshop
—ALEMAR’S was derived from Mrs. Sibal’s name—ALEgria, and the first given name of the Sibal daughters, MARia.
 VISIT ALEMAR'S, 1975 AD

ALEMAR'S, in its heyday, had its main store on Rizal Avenue and branches in Ermita, Recto, Quezon City and Makati. It
ventured into printing and publishing in 1950, through its Phoenix Press and Phoenix Publishing House.
DOVER & SUNSET BOOKS, 1978 AD
 BY 1975, ALEMAR'S WAS EVEN SELLING KIDDIE CLOTHES!

ALEMAR’S carried more than just books—local, imported, textbooks, used books-- it also sold school and office supplies,
toys, men’s, ladies’ and children’s wear, home accessories, magazines and more. Central Book Supply, a division specializing in
law books, was also put up. With more aggressive competition from National Bookstore and with heirs leaving for
the U.S., ALEMAR'S started closing its shops in the 1980s.
Company type Public
Traded as PSE: ECP
Industry Telecommunications
Founded September 25, 1989
 Pager-related services (until 2002)
 Contact center outsourcing
Services  Information technology services
 Broadband internet

Parent Transnational Diversified Group

Website easycall.com.ph

EasyCall Communications Philippines, Inc. (ECP), or simply known as EasyCall, is a

telecommunications company most noted for its paging services in the Philippines in the 1990s.[1] It ended
paging services in 2002, shifting to other telecommunications services.

History
Pager era

It was established on September 25, 1989, as the Francisco N. Cervantes, Inc.. The company went public in
1992 and was listed in the Philippine Stock Exchange. It also changed its name to its current name,
EasyCall.[2]

Its main competition was PocketBell. Both EasyCall and PocketBell claimed 50 to 60 ma

rket share of the Philippines' paging industry.[3] EasyCall's paging services covered the entire Philippines.[4]
At its peak, EasyCall operated 16 paging sites across the Philippines which has the capacity to cater to
300,000 subscribers.[5]

Phaseout of paging services and diversification

EasyCall ended its paging services in 2002 due to introduction and growing adoption of short messaging
service through mobile phones in the late 1990s. It ended its provincial paging services (except Cebu) in
March 2002, and its Metro Manila and Cebu operations in November 2002. Its subscribers were absorbed by
Island Country Telecommunications which operates the paging service named Jaspage.[5] It shifted to
engaging in contact center outsourcing and other information technology businesses.[2] It started its
outsourcing business in 1999 and added information technology to its line of services in 2000. It also began
offering broadband services in 2015.[4]

In 2001, it was acquired by the Transnational Diversified Group.[6]

Enron Corporation was an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston,
Texas. It was founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985 as a merger between Lay's Houston Natural Gas and
InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies. Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron
employed approximately 20,600 staff and was a major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp
and paper company, with claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000.[1] Fortune named Enron
"America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years.

At the end of 2001, it was revealed that Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an
institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal.
Enron has become synonymous with willful corporate fraud and corruption. The scandal also brought into
question the accounting practices and activities of many corporations in the United States and was a factor in
the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. The scandal also affected the greater business world by
causing, together with even larger fraudulent bankruptcy WorldCom, the dissolution of the Arthur Andersen
accounting firm, which had been Enron and WorldCom's main auditor for years.[2]

Enron filed for bankruptcy in the Southern District of New York in late 2001 and selected Weil, Gotshal &
Manges as its bankruptcy counsel. It ended its bankruptcy in November 2004, pursuant to a court-approved
plan of reorganization. A new board of directors changed the name of Enron to Enron Creditors Recovery
Corp., and emphasized reorganizing and liquidating certain operations and assets of the pre-bankruptcy
Enron.[3] On September 7, 2006, Enron sold its last remaining subsidiary, Prisma Energy International, to
Ashmore Energy International Ltd. (now AEI).[4] It is the largest bankruptcy, due specifically to fraud, of all
time.[5]

Olympia was a popular typewriter in Europe. Both office and portable (from 1931) typewriters were produced. In the
beginning of 1990th the factory was closed.

Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj in Finnish and Nokia Abp in Swedish,[5] referred to as Nokia)[a] is
a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation,
established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, in the greater Helsinki metropolitan
area,[3] but the company's actual roots are in the Tampere region of Pirkanmaa.[6] In 2020, Nokia employed
approximately 92,000 people[7] across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and
reported annual revenues of around €23 billion.[4] Nokia is a public limited company listed on the Nasdaq
Helsinki and New York Stock Exchange.[8] It was the world's 415th-largest company measured by 2016
revenues, according to the Fortune Global 500, having peaked at 85th place in 2009.[9] It is a component of
the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index.[10][11]

The company has operated in various industries over the past 150 years. It was founded as a pulp mill and
had long been associated with rubber and cables, but since the 1990s has focused on large-scale
telecommunications infrastructure, technology development, and licensing.[12] Nokia made significant
contributions to the mobile telephony industry, assisting in the development of the GSM, 3G, and LTE
standards. For a decade beginning in 1998, Nokia was the largest worldwide vendor of mobile phones and
smartphones. In the later 2000s, however, Nokia suffered from a series of poor management decisions, and
soon saw its share of the mobile phone market drop sharply.

After a partnership with Microsoft and Nokia's subsequent market struggles,[13][14][15] in 2014 Microsoft
bought Nokia's mobile phone business,[16][17] incorporating it as Microsoft Mobile.[18] After the sale, Nokia
began to focus more on its telecommunications infrastructure business and on Internet of things
technologies, marked by the divestiture of its Here mapping division and the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent,
including its Bell Labs research organization.[19] The company then also experimented with virtual reality
and digital health, the latter through the purchase of Withings.[20][21][22][23] The Nokia brand returned to the
mobile and smartphone market in 2016 through a licensing arrangement with HMD.[24] Nokia continues to
be a major patent licensor for most large mobile phone vendors.[25] As of 2018, Nokia is the world's third-
largest network equipment manufacturer.[26]

The company was viewed with national pride by Finns, as its mobile phon
e business made it by far the largest worldwide company and brand from Finland.[27] At its peak in 2000,
Nokia accounted for 4% of the country's GDP, 21% of total exports, and 70% of the Nasdaq Helsinki market
capital.[28][29]

History

Lack of innovation: Nokia's inability to innovate was another factor that led to its downfall. The company failed to
keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancements in the smartphone industry and was slow to introduce
new features and functionalities that consumers were demanding.