Issues

The Monocle 100 issue, out now: Our definitive directory and radical dose of optimism

There’s a change of pace this issue. We’ve put to one side the page architecture that usually shapes the issue and given the entire magazine over to The Monocle 100, a directory of people who we like, places with important stories to share and products that we covet. It’s a list that is hopefully useful but raises some smiles too.

We started working on this project some months ago, asking our team to nominate everything from the best military kit to running shoes, artworks to modernist apartment blocks (and even the ultimate roadside shrubbery). I think that they’ve done a fine job, even if there was some jostling for page acreage among editors keen to allow their selections to shine.

Beyond the competitive fun of pulling this together, there’s another reason why I hope that this issue hits the mark. It is a celebration of talent, shining a light on both established and aspiring names. It’s also a blast of positivity, global know-how and spotting opportunities at a time when such ambition can often be hard to locate in our media – or, indeed, anywhere.

So, you’ll meet a man taking a stance against graffiti vandals scarring his city, discover how Dr Stretch is manipulating a nation back to litheness, see how architecture is helping a city to rediscover its soul after a terror attack, slip into a cosy armchair in the perfect airport lounge and have a go on a vending machine that supports local businesses.

Also commanding some prime glossy-papered real estate in this issue is our annual Property Survey, which is timed to land ahead of Mipim in Cannes, the industry’s largest fair (we will be there again this year with a Monocle Radio studio at Le Palais des Festivals). Over our nicely appointed pages, we visit a new public housing project in Singapore that’s embracing nature, drop in on the agents charged with selling Dubai’s most valuable homes in the city’s highly competitive market and see why developers in Japan are wooing renters with pooches. Poodle power is on the rise. I’m all for it.

While I have you, if you are a subscriber, take a tour around our rapidly expanding collection of digital city guides – Palma and Dubai have just gone live. Written by our editors and correspondents, they are constantly being updated and will help you to unpack a city with ease. Come to think of it, they deserved an entry in The Monocle 100.

There’s another piece of travel news to share too. Always passionate about good hospitality, we have just launched the The Monocle Townhouse at the Widder Hotel in Zürich. This three-bedroom establishment, with an epic roof terrace, sits on the heart of the city and all of its furniture, art and fittings have been selected by us. There’s some rather fine reading material too for guests to peruse.

Finally, there are also upcoming events in the Gulf and Asia. You might have guessed that we like spending time with our readers. In the meantime, if you have thoughts or ideas to share, please always feel free to send me an email at at@monocle.com. Have a great month.

‘If you have the privilege, this is a way to survive.’ How two 1950s towers built community in São Paulo

Illustrator Ana Strumpf moved to the Locarno building with her sons having lived in the US for four years. “I needed a neighbourhood that I could walk around,” she says gesturing to the vast window of her airy, art-filled apartment in the 1950s structure. Locarno is one of two identical buildings (the other named Lugano) in São Paulo’s Higienópolis and in is a portal to the past that offers some clues to what makes a meaningful community today.

From her studio in what would originally have been the maid’s bedroom, she says that the appeal of living here is the lively community. Strumpf is in a Whatsapp group with the parents who live in the buildings and organises parties for the children. One of her sons, she says, regularly goes down to the garden and plays with her neighbours’ dogs.

The architecture also provides entertainment of another kind for the boys. “Sometimes they like doing silly things that 12-year-olds tend to do, like pull moonies from the windows,” she says with only the slightest hint of disapproval. Once they’re safely at school, she throws open the shutters, partly to let in the breeze as she works but also because she knows that a well-known concert pianist, who lives above her, likes to practice every day at 11.00. “When he plays – oh my God,” she says. “This place is heaven.”

Lofty praise indeed for architecture’s capacity to make homes from houses and forge social connections, as well as for the vision of the building’s designer, Adolf Franz Heep. The émigré, known among contemporaries for gliding through the downtown in his distinctive slim bow ties, had arrived in Brazil in 1947 from Germany. He’d been helping with post-war reconstruction and separated from his Jewish wife by the Nazis. Following his escape across the Atlantic (at the age of 45 and using a fake passport) he joined the office of Frenchman Jacques Pilon and helped to complete the new HQ of newspaper O Estado de S Paulo, including subterranean printing presses. Heep’s solo designs for residential blocks soon followed. Relatively affordable and aimed at a burgeoning Brazilian middle class, Edifício Lausanne, with its red and turquoise aluminium blinds, is regularly name checked in today’s architectural guides; and at 47 storeys high, Edifício Italia still presides gracefully over Praça Republica.

Today, architect André Scarpa is convinced that the 1958 Locarno and Lugano buildings are Heep’s masterpiece. Scarpa knew of the buildings before he moved in and even once designed a shelving unit inspired by their H-shaped exterior window planters. He met his partner, Pedro Rossi, in 2023. After just two months they jumped at an available rental and moved in with their dogs Ipê and Gil. “I used to think that I loved Lausanne and lived in Lugano,” Scarpa says a little wistfully. “Now I think this design is better. Lausanne is very visual, with its coloured shutters, but Lugano and Locarno have light that flows through the apartments, the ceilings are high at 2.8 metres and every room connects perfectly.”

Higienópolis sill feels like a precious slice of old São Paulo in a city that likes to keep up with trends. On a Sunday, the queue for Mirian’s rotisserie chicken served from a hole-in-the-wall stretches round the block. Those waiting patiently are muttering that a much-loved bar has recently undergone a brutal refurbishment but another stalwart from the 1960s called Ugue’s still packs them in for feijoada (stew) and cold beers. Weekend runners in jogging kit are a common sight but you can spy uniformed maids walking packs of pedigree dogs, if you keep your eyes peeled.

Found beyond security gates (a 1980s addition), Lugano and Locarno lie perpendicular to the neighbourhood’s gently climbing main avenue. A mirror image of each another, they stand on either side of a narrow garden; their names spelled out in discreet sans serif ironmongery. A gardener sweeps the ochre paving stones with an old broom, clearing away branches and fruit from the guiambê shrubs, manacá-da-serra and palm trees. On the ground floor of each building are three apartments and two entrances with canopies held up by tapering white-tiled pillars. Inside, wide curving stairs – the steps and rails painted a soothing cream – take residents to other floors. While lower apartments have glass bricks that allow in plenty of light, the 12 floors above (with four apartments on each level) rely on windows that stretch their entire length.

The buildings are certainly attractive and welcoming places to live but they seem to be a particular draw to architecture obsessives. Agnaldo Farias, who teaches art and design at the nearby University of São Paulo, lives on the eighth floor of Lugano. “Heep was such a serious, meticulous architect with an eye for detail,” he says, citing the German’s education under Ernst May and Adolf Meyer at the Kunstschule in Frankfurt and years spent working with Le Corbusier in Paris. “Nothing escaped him. He brought ideas from Europe but adapted them to Brazil, understanding the climate, the problems,” he says with enthusiasm. “The ventilation windows above the main windows, for example. With their individual levers they’re so clever and they make for better living.”

With so much glass, however, each block offers views straight into the apartments of the opposite building. “Like Rear Window,” Farias says jokingly, in reference to the Alfred Hitchcock film. Scarpa admits that he had concerns when he first moved in. “I was worried about privacy but we respect each other, we all know each other,” he says. “I can look across and know [my neighbour] Claude is there today; that Juliana is back from holiday. Heep was interested in how the middle classes might live socially in a city as big and busy as São Paulo. If you have the privilege, this is a way to survive as a community without going crazy.”

Manoel Veiga, a painter who has lived on the second floor of Lugano for the past 18 years, says that there are more children here than when he first arrived. “I came at a moment of generational change,” he says. “My neighbours used to be much older and many had even lived here since the building was new but they were passing. I think my daughter, who is now 14, was one of the first children here.”

Veiga is proud that his apartment remains just as Heep designed it. Visitors step immediately into the living area, which stretches the entire depth of the floor plan, with a dining space to the rear. Here, Veiga and his wife, Nalu, have their morning coffee at an old bar table from Rio de Janeiro, watching the street behind the block come to life. On each shelf are what he calls his “nanocollections” – clusters of interesting objects that he’s picked up from antique markets and on his travels. There are vintage miniature spirits, little wooden boats and model airplanes, as well as magazines from 1966, the year that he was born. The kitchen runs into the old servants’ area and, like Strumpf, the artist has set up a workspace with a desk, chair and books in the former maid’s room. Across the adjoining corridor are the apartment’s three main bedrooms, though Veiga has turned one of these into a wet studio, a carpet of canvas protecting the floor from paint. Pinky-brown floorboards that run throughout are original, hence the care. “It is very hard to find peroba rosa wood anymore,” he says. “It’s very resistant, hard-wearing. Seven decades and I’ve never had any problems with termites.”

Veiga laments one detail, however. The previous owner changed the bathtub. To get a glimpse of the original, you need to visit art producer Thais Francoski’s nearby apartment, kept bright with its white walls and minimal decor. The 34-year-old has been in Locarno for three years, her first address in São Paulo after moving from Curitiba in the south of the country. She jokes that her neighbours know if she is having a party because her friends always end up dancing by the windows. Her bathroom, unchanged since Heep signed off on his project, is a vision of mid-century style: the walls are lined with aqua-blue tiles, matched by the chunky ceramic of the toilet, pear-shaped bidet and vast sunken tub.

Light flows in through the clouded glass bricks of the bathroom’s exterior wall. It also proves a party draw. “There are so many selfies by friends posted from this bathroom,” she says. The arrival of younger residents, as well as the pandemic, have loosened the community’s rules a little too. As well as sitting on benches outside to read or chat with neighbours, residents often take yoga mats or dumbbells down to the garden for exercise sessions, which was previously frowned upon. Children are not supposed to use skateboards but this has been allowed now too. Francoski bemoans that the communality only stretches so far, though. “The only complaint I have is that I can’t sunbathe in the garden in my bikini. It’s not allowed. We need sun though.” Heep, she tells Monocle, would have been on her side. After all, she opines, “this architecture is all about being healthy”.

‘Good deeds should be done in silence’: Meet the anti-graffiti artist working in secret to clean the walls of Brescia

He goes by the name of Ghost Pitùr – but it’s tough trying to get more personal details out of him. Born and bred in the northern Italian city of Brescia and in his thirties, he’s a professional painter by day and a crusader against the scourge of graffiti by night. Often wearing a hoodie, he goes out under the cover of darkness to repaint buildings that have been defaced. His motivation? Returning what he calls “visual harmony” to the Lombardian city that he loves.

Is he the anti-Banksy, armed with a paintbrush rather than spray cans? He sees some similarities, though he’s keen to point out that he isn’t an artist. “Just like Banksy, my message is crucial,” he tells Monocle. “I am criticising how and why so many buildings have been ruined and defaced with graffiti that has nothing artistic about it. The façades of houses are not canvases; they are not spaces designed to be written on. They were built and painted with care, work, effort and sacrifice – and for this reason, they must be respected.”

Irked by the “presumptuousness and arrogance” of those who choose to scrawl on a wall, he’s keen to carry out his act of urban love incognito – which might explain why he gets cold feet and backs out of a face-to-face meeting with Monocle. He says that he hopes to inspire other people to act like him, even while his identity remains a mystery.

“Anonymity is very important to me,” he says. “Mainly because I believe that good deeds should be done in silence, without profit and without wanting to get anything in return.”

‘The solution is not more tourists.’ Málaga’s mayor navigates his growth challenge

Since 2000, the 83-year-old mayor of Málaga, Francisco de la Torre, has overseen its transformation from a holiday resort into a city with year-round cultural and economic pull. On his watch, passenger numbers at Málaga airport have risen to 25 million a year. The Carmen Thyssen, Picasso and Pompidou museums have anchored a cultural offering with longevity, while nanotechnology firms, research centres and international business schools have bolstered an economy that was once reliant on tourism. Steady diversification and political stability are De la Torre’s central achievements – and why he has won six consecutive elections since assuming office 26 years ago, making him one of Europe’s longest-serving mayors.

That stability has helped Málaga to invest in public spaces, pedestrianisation and improved liveability. The mayor’s policies have supported the historic centre, while annual hotel occupancy in Málaga city is 84 per cent – well above the national average. But success has brought challenges. Half a million cruise passengers arrive in the city a year, swelling footfall on its streets and beaches. Locals and visitors jostle daily for space, just as parakeets and pigeons square up along the orange-treelined Alameda Principal. De la Torre insists that the city’s next phase will be defined less by growth than by control. “The solution is not more tourists,” he says. “It is better-quality tourism, with greater spending capacity.”

The mayor is leading the way with creative solutions to problems that are particularly acute in Spain, such as overtourism and housing. Like their compatriots, malagueños are contending with a housing crisis; prices rose 25 per cent in the city last year, with foreign buyers accounting for a third of purchases. In response, De la Torre froze new tourist-flat licences in central districts and is planning a tax on short-term rentals. The revenue generated, says the mayor, will help to fund rent subsidies for locals on lower incomes. He is also lobbying for more devolved power. Málaga has land for about 6,000 homes that are ready to be built but plots for 28,000 remain tied up in planning. “Local governments in Spain have responsibility but not the power,” says De la Torre.

At a polished table in Málaga city hall, he sketches on a pad of paper as he speaks. The drawings illustrate two subjects that dominate his thinking: how to encourage visitors to explore Málaga beyond its beautiful but crowded centre and the complexity of the Guadalmedina river project – an ambitious regeneration plan that he hopes to deliver before leaving office. The project would create a mile-long green corridor above an underground road link to Málaga’s booming port. But at a cost of €300m, it will require national and European funds. “It’s very complex,” says De la Torre. But he is determined. “I always think first of the city for the citizen,” says a mayor who returned to work within a month of having a stroke in 2020. “If the city is good for the people of Málaga, it will also be good for those who visit.”

A masterclass in camouflage and military architecture on the island of Gotland

“The client wanted to send a message that we weren’t going to just throw up some barracks,” says Henrik Jonsson Linton, an architect at Stockholm-based practice CF Møller. After winning a Swedish Fortifications Agency competition to design a new base for the P18 armoured regiment on the Baltic island of Gotland, the team at CF Møller decided to reimagine what a military complex could look like. The result is a garrison that defies convention, blending elements of functionality, security and architectural distinction into a striking, understatedly Scandinavian visual identity.

The Gotlands Garrison’s simple design belies its functionality. As well as sleeping quarters, there are offices, a canteen, several vehicle-repair workshops and a medical clinic. Because it’s the base of an armoured regiment, it needed to be spacious enough to allow vehicles and people to co-exist and work in high-pressure situations. “Basically, no one should get run over by a tank,” says Jonsson Linton.

The architects were also tasked with making the garrison’s buildings blend in with their heavily wooded surroundings, which would bring both strategic and aesthetic benefits. The challenge, says Jonsson Linton, was to preserve “the feeling of wild nature” while meeting the security standards of a modern army. It was a steep learning curve for the designers. Early proposals featured glass façades, which the military immediately ruled out because of the material’s delicate nature. Still, CF Møller managed to sneak in enough glass to filter some of the diaphanous Gotland light while conforming to the complex’s technical requirements.

Gotland is a logistical site that is crucial to Sweden and Nato’s strategy of deterrence and defence in the Baltics. There are plans to use it as a logistics hub if conflict ever breaks out between Russia and Nato. The Swedish Armed Forces has also announced its intention to create a combat group of 4,500 soldiers to be permanently stationed on the island – a key part of the 27,000 new recruits it hopes to add to the ranks by 2030.

When Monocle visits, 300 conscripts are being put through their paces. “The work that we do feels urgent and inspiring but we have a challenge: the combat group isn’t yet complete,” says Joakim Marklund, P18’s deputy regimental commander. “That’s why our international joint combat exercises are incredibly important, so that we can be a deterrent and still have enough time to produce the combat brigade.”

The garrison’s new residents seem content with their workplace. “It’s great that everything is new and clean,” says Cornelia Ohlsson, an armoured-vehicle gunner. “I wasn’t keen on doing national service but now I think that it’s really fun,” says Aram Shakeley, an armoured group commander. “It’s good to be part of something that’s being built from scratch.”

Looking out towards the woodlands that still cover much of the garrison, Tomas Ängshammar, a spokesperson for the P18 regiment, is already thinking about the next phase of development, in which thousands more soldiers will arrive to fill the base’s bunkrooms and pathways. “The challenge that we’re facing is that the geopolitical situation keeps changing,” he says. “But we can be flexible in how we’ll respond to that, thanks to this location.”

Alexandre Vidal Porto: Brazil’s consul-general in Amsterdam championing dignity for the diaspora

Diplomats should neither affirm nor dispel stereotypes, but they do have to embody their nation. In this respect, Alexandre Vidal Porto is a fitting emissary for Brazil. The country’s consul-general in Amsterdam is a career diplomat and an acclaimed novelist – trust Brazil to send a poet to deal with passport renewals. He is also a tireless servant of his compatriots abroad. “I love to think that I may make a difference in the life of my people,” he tells Monocle at his Amsterdam apartment.

The Brazilian consulate, 10 minutes’ walk from Vidal Porto’s home, is not a chandeliered space. In the World Trade Center in Amsterdam-Zuid, away from the city’s canals and 17th-century townhouses, it is a place for the Dutch capital’s burgeoning Brazilian population to solve their bureaucratic problems. The Brazilian diaspora has grown rapidly here in recent years, fuelled in part by post-Brexit displacement from the UK. An estimated 80,000 now live in the Netherlands, with a significant proportion of them thought to be working in informal employment, such as domestic or sex work. Beyond the stamps and forms necessary for expatriate life, the consul-general understands that diplomacy is a human endeavour. “I want the dignity of my fellow nationals to remain intact,” he says. In the corner of the consulate’s reception is a children’s play area that was added to the space by Vidal Porto.

Consul-general is an interesting diplomatic role – its holder has less of a profile than an ambassador but they are also freed from the ceremonial decorum required of a head of mission. This means they can push harder to get things done. Before arriving in the Netherlands, Vidal Porto served as consul-general in Frankfurt, where he helped secure the release of two Brazilian women wrongly imprisoned on drug charges. When President Lula returned to power in 2023, Vidal Porto was dispatched to Amsterdam. The practical reason for the posting was unglamorous: it meant that Vidal Porto’s dog could travel between missions by car. But the motivation ran deep.

Many Brazilians in Amsterdam live in precarious conditions, and it is these people whom Vidal Porto is most keen to help. Everyone who walks through the consulate doors is met with patience. “Diplomacy should move towards the human,” the consul explains. He spends his days assisting those in domestic-violence cases, custody disputes and wrongful arrests, speaking with Dutch authorities about, for example, the difference between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Literature and diplomacy, for him, share the same impulse – both focus on the individual. “These are my people,” he says. “They didn’t find space to fully bloom where they were born but they will now.”

Spotlight on Admiral Samuel J Paparo, the man who could call the shots in any future US-China conflict

If the defining contest of the 21st century is to be that between the US and China, then we would do well to learn the names of those who will be calling the shots. Since 2024, Admiral Samuel J Paparo has been the head of US Indo-Pacific Command – about 380,000 US personnel stationed in 38 countries. He is the most senior US officer charged with overseeing any future clash with China.

These are challenging times to be wearing four stars in the American military. Since Donald Trump returned to presidential office last January, the commander-in-chief has ordered US forces to take action in Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Somalia – and has been making vague threats towards Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Mexico and Panama.

Given these whiplash-inducing scenarios, Paparo occupies one of the most important of all posts. As a shrewd officer, he understands that any US-China conflict won’t only be a physical war. At the Honolulu Defense Forum in January, Paparo noted that information and cyber operations have become “a salient form of warfare”. He believes that militaries have to accept the idea that information operations must be integral to everything they do, rather than a simple afterthought.

Paparo ascended through the navy ranks, which helps in his efforts to convince the old guard about new methods. He was a naval aviator, graduating from the US Navy’s strike fighter tactics instructor programme. He has flown F-14s, F-15s and F/A-18s, and made 1,100 carrier landings. He has also undertaken less lofty missions, including leading a provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan.

More recently, he has served as commander of the US Fifth Fleet, which generally conducts the US Navy’s operations in the Middle East, and of the US Pacific Fleet. Admiral Paparo wouldn’t be the one deciding whether the US rode to the defence of Taiwan or engaged in combat with China for any other reason. But he would get a big say in how any war that followed was fought.

Why Montenegro is the small but mighty future of the European Union

What are the chances of Montenegro becoming the first new EU member state since 2013? With an official population of about 630,000, it wouldn’t be Europe’s tiniest – though it would be smaller than every other nation except Malta. Nonetheless, senior EU figures are keen to complete accession talks by the end of this year. “If we finish in 2026 with the technical part of the negotiations, then in 2028 we could get the 28th member of the EU,” the European commissioner for enlargement, Marta Kos, told the Bled Strategic Forum last September.

This is in keeping with prime minister Milojko Spajic’s vision of his country as one “that makes the EU richer”. The usual concern of existing EU member states is that expansion to the less economically developed nations east of the continent might affect the fortunes of those already in the bloc. But in this analysis, Montenegro’s size works in its favour. What the EU would be gaining, after all, is a rare example of an ethnically diverse country that boasts harmonious internal relations. The largest part of the population identifies as Montenegrin – but they are collectively outnumbered by a combination of Serbs, Bosniaks and other ethnic groups. Before Spajic and his centrist Europe Now! party took power in 2023, the prime minister was Dritan Abazovic, an ethnic Albanian.

The economy, meanwhile, grew by more than 3 per cent over the past two years, while the country’s main port, Bar, is also vital for Montenegro’s landlocked neighbours, particularly Serbia – and the railway line to Belgrade is one of the world’s most spectacular. The vertiginous Mala Rijeka viaduct across the Moraca river canyon is Europe’s highest railway bridge, showcasing the austere charms of the mountainous landscape.

Natural beauty is the country’s greatest asset, with the peaks continuing all the way to the coast, where the Adriatic glitters and tourism is big business – accounting for more than a quarter of total GDP. Locals like to boast that they can ski in the morning and take a dip in the sea after lunch. Alternatively, you can enjoy the catch of the day at the Adriatic’s longest beach, the appropriately named Velika Plaza (“long beach”).

Financial opportunities abound – especially with the government set to introduce visa restrictions for Russians, who have previously been the country’s largest investors. As they sell up, buyers from Turkey, the US and the UAE are moving in.

Beyond property and tourism, low taxes, a well-educated workforce and potential for sustainable energy are considerable attractions. And after work, it’s time to tango. The mountain town of Kolasin switches from skiing to Latin dance in the summer, with its long-running tango camp. For those with two left feet, a thriving contemporary art scene – boosted considerably by Russian exiles – offers a different kind of culture. Or there’s viniculture: vranac is Montenegro’s indigenous grape and, when produced by Plantaze at Europe’s largest single vineyard, Cemovsko Polje, makes for a bold glass of red. When Montenegro’s EU membership is confirmed, expect it to flow freely.

Groupe d’études géopolitiques: The chic Parisian think tank championing Europe

Groupe d’études géopolitiques (GEG) is one of those French phrases that don’t translate well into English. The Parisian think tank, founded in 2017 by three students from École normale supérieure (ENS), the grandest of France’s grand école universities, is much more than the “geopolitical studies group” of its name. In fact, it might just be the world’s coolest think tank – admittedly not the most crowded of fields.

To be fair, GEG’s name is an accurate description of the think tank’s birth. Its three founders – Gilles Gressani, Mathéo Malik and Pierre Ramond – who were at various stages of their degrees at ENS, began to organise debates devoted to geopolitics at the university. In 2019, Ramona Bloj joined the gang, who launched a complementary journal, Le Grand Continent, devoted to European politics. At a time when right-wing think tanks seem to be in the ascendant, what distinguishes GEG is its avowedly internationalist, pro-European and pro-EU outlook.

As French politics veers ever rightwards and the European project seems in decline, think tanks such as GEG could offer hope for intellectual renewal. It publishes three semi-annual journals, each in its own natty colourway: a red one devoted to law, green to the environment and blue to European elections. Contributors have included Emmanuel Macron, Kaja Kallas and Josep Borrell. This year, GEG launched a series of books, La Bibliothèque de géopolitique, with Gallimard, a publishing house almost synonymous with Gallic intellectual chic.
geopolitique.eu

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How Nokia is reinventing itself for the era of 6G and AI

There was a time when Nokia was synonymous with mobile phones that could withstand just about anything. In its heyday, the company ranked above the likes of McDonald’s and Google as the world’s fifth-most valuable brand and it controlled more than 40 per cent of the global mobile-phone market. Then came smartphones. The qualities that had made Nokia so successful – sturdiness, dependability – were no longer seen as key selling points. In 2013 the company hung up its mobile-phone arm, selling it to Microsoft. Many assumed that the brand would simply disappear, swept aside by flashier, shinier alternatives.

But a look around the city of Oulu in northern Finland tells another story. The business is making a comeback. Last September, Nokia opened a 55,000 sq m campus in Oulu. The goal? To cement Nokia’s pivot to communication networks, researching, developing and manufacturing wireless 5G and 6G networks.

When Monocle visits, the factory floor hums with activity as autonomous robots shuttle components along the assembly line. Production specialists and engineers are working at full capacity, driven by demand from the artificial intelligence boom. “This is where we prepare for the next decade,” says Jarkko Pyykkönen, Nokia Oulu’s head. “The AI supercycle will be powered by 6G, connecting not just people but billions of intelligent machines.”

Most of Nokia’s main competitors are now Chinese. Its factory also c0-operates with the nearby Nato test centre on developing defence-grade 6G communications technology. The partnership underscores a strategic reality: the stability of Europe’s digital backbone increasingly depends on trusted network suppliers. Given Nokia’s expertise in secure radio technology – from tactical 5G “bubbles” for battlefield use to encrypted industrial networks – the company is at the heart of those conversations.

Results from 2025 were positive, with overall sales revenue at €19.9bn and year-on-year growth at 3 per cent. US chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, agreed a $1bn (€850m) equity investment in the Finnish firm late last year. Expectations for 2026 are high as Nokia holds thousands of 5G patents and is involved in shaping the protocols that will define future 6G networks.

Though Nokia’s days as a globally renowned phone brand are over, its next chapter could prove even more essential to the world by keeping connections secure and stable. It is, once again, a company to watch.