Rajeev Suri was born on 10 October 1967 in New Delhi, India. He grew up in Kuwait. He is a Singaporean citizen and is based in Espoo, Finland. Rajeev Suri has a Bachelor’s of Engineering (Electronics and Communications) from Manipal Institute of Technology, which was affiliated to Mangalore University at that time.

In his more than 20 years of international experience, Rajeev has worked in roles comprising strategy and M&A, product marketing, sales, major account leadership, regional and business unit leadership and has lived in Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe. He worked for multinational corporations in India and Nigeria before joining Nokia in 1995.

Suri followed Simon Beresford-Wylie as the CEO of NSN in October 2009 after Nokia Networks and Siemens Networks had been merged. He is considered a ‘turnaround specialist’ in the global tech circles. He is responsible for consolidating the telecom industry by various acquisitions including Motorola, Panasonic , Alcatel Lucent and Siemens.

On 23 November 2011, Suri announced that the company planned to eliminate 17,000 jobs by the end of 2013 to enable NSN to refocus on mobile broadband equipment, the fastest-growing segment of the market. The reductions would slash the company’s work force by 23 percent from 74,000. The cuts followed NSN’s $1.2 billion purchase of Motorola’s mobile network equipment business in July 2010, which added staff; and would help the company trim annual operating expenses by $1.35 billion by the end of 2013.

On 29 April 2014, Suri was appointed as the CEO of Nokia. This was after Nokia had bought back full control of NSN and sold Nokia’s phone division to Microsoft Mobile. Suri was the second non-Finnish CEO of Nokia after Stephen Elop.

On 2 March 2020, Nokia announced that Suri will step down as CEO of Nokia. He will be replaced by Pekka Lundmark, starting 1 August 2020.