FEATURE: Just five months after taking over as CEO, Justin Hotard ushered in a new era for Nokia as it officially opened the doors to a “state of the art” R&D and manufacturing campus in the Finnish city of Oulu.
Described as “the home of radio”, the impressive new facility has been five years in the making after the project kicked off in 2020, with construction starting in June 2022 and completed in May this year.
Mobile World Live (MWL) was invited to tour the campus on Thursday (4 September), a day before Hotard officially cut the ribbon and opened the site at a lavish event attended by Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb and officials from the Finnish government.
As we heard throughout the two-day visit, the opening marks a significant moment for the city of Oulu, Finland, Nokia and Hotard himself, as the organisation looks “to deliver next-generation networks built for AI”.
Former Intel executive Hotard (middle, left) came into the Nokia job against the backdrop of a testy geopolitical situation and an evolving tariff landscape, with big expectations around his ability to propel the company’s AI ambitions, tap into the data centre opportunity and ramp up activity beyond a stagnant communications infrastructure market.
Indeed, in his first few months in the job Hotard has looked to shake things up – hinting at a restructure, with more expected to be revealed in November. He has also pressed on a need for the vendor to aggressively pursue opportunities created by the AI supercycle and suggested he was open to shifting more of Nokia’s production to the US to stave off the tariff threat.
In a briefing as part of the big campus opening, Hotard went big on the importance of the location of the new facility, pointing to the significance of the site “in terms of technology innovation strategically for Nokia, Finland, of course for Europe, and honestly, for the democratic world”.
“I think we realise that geopolitically, having this kind of technology, this continued investment in technology, and the commitment we’re making in Nokia is much more significant. And why? Because if you look ahead in the world, we’re at the start of the AI supercycle and connectivity is only going to become more essential.”
Opening Oulu
At 55,000 square metres, 3,000 Nokia employees will be based at the campus which includes a manufacturing factory, R&D laboratories, office space and in keeping with Finnish tradition, a rooftop sauna.
Nokia was keen to emphasise supply chain benefits of bringing R&D and manufacturing under one roof, as well as putting a big focus on green initiatives. The campus uses 100 per cent renewable energy and an on-site energy station serving as one of the world’s largest CO2 based district heating and cooling plants. Any additional energy is used to heat 20,000 households in Oulu.
During the visit, MWL was given access to the factory floor, which runs through a combination of automated robots and 400 human employees, and will be used for New Product Introduction (NPI) for Nokia’s 5G radio and baseband products.
Other areas shown off included an R&D laboratory and product verification and testing chamber facilities certified by global regulators for radio frequency validation at extreme temperatures.
Away from the impressive new site, Oulu is home to two other facilities: the OuluZone field verification area which the vendor uses to develop radio systems for civilian and defence applications in collaboration with academic institutions, startups and NATO’s DIANA 6G project.
We also took a tour of an over-the-air validation area (Otava), used to test its networks under simulated real-world scenarios, including Arctic conditions.
Lifecycle
Speaking to MWL, Jarrko Pyykkonen, head of Oulu Technology Campus, said the facility should rightly be known as the home of radio because there is a push to cover the entire lifecycle of 5G and future 6G radio innovation, ensuring networks are designed, built and tested in Europe.
From System-on-Chip design, software development, patent and standardisation work and base station hardware, Pyykkonen emphasised the site provides the necessary base for Nokia to continue its push to lead development in the mobile sector.
Echoing Hotard, he said it was important to stay in Europe because of the foundations laid down by the vendor over a number of decades.
“When I think about complex technology like 5G and now 6G, it does not happen accidentally. It requires you to have deep roots, deep experience, a working ecosystem including research activities with other companies and seamless collaboration with city representatives in the case of Oulu. That is the key reason Nokia is investing here. A strong experience from the past and a good track record as well.”
Importance of R&D
With the company forced to cut its 2025 outlook in its last financial results, Hotard already has his work cut out to turn around fortunes.
Indeed, Nokia executives running the tour were tight-lipped on how much the new site cost, only to state it was part of a €150 billion investment made in R&D by the company since 2000.
Hotard acknowledged Nokia’s strong foundations, adding he had not taken a role at a company in “crisis”. Equally, the importance of R&D is not lost on Hotard, but he argued it was more prudent to not focus on the investment size, but rather “where we are investing and where we are being productive”.
The executive explained that, specifically in the telecoms sector, the investment decisions made today will no doubt show up in the next five to 10 years and it is then you will see that R&D in actual products.
“Obviously where we see opportunities to drive long-term growth and value, we will invest in R&D. It’s always about balance and discipline. It’s not about what the absolute metrics are, it’s about where you are investing and really digging into that.”
In terms of regions, Hotard emphasised the importance of the US, Nokia’s “second home,” pointing out the country actually has more employees based there than in Finland.
Essentially, Hotard is looking to “invest in places that we think have geopolitical stability”, highlighting a “strong legacy of foreign R&D” in the US, Europe, India and Japan.
Weighing in, president of Mobile Networks Tommi Uitto added Nokia was “very diligent” about where it invests and a process is in place to determine which countries it sells its products to and operates in. “There is no grey area.”
Defence, enterprise
In his own speech, Uitto provided a glimpse at some of the key focus areas for his division and the company going forward, as mobile continues to evolve.
Aside from calling for a strong show of strength for the European Union in response to an expected ban in China, Uitto highlighted two fast growing market segments that could offset a “flatish” operator segment.
Uitto first opened up on private wireless for enterprise and industrial, stating the company had been selling solutions to “some big oil, gas and water companies”, while hinting at big partnerships in the railway sector both around signalling and passenger experience.
“The enterprise market is growing double digit. I don’t think we have recently given any accurate numbers, but I can safely say there is clearly double-digit percentage growth. And the same applies to defence.”
Defence is of course another big target area for Nokia. Uitto said the company’s strategy is fairly simple. “In today’s war fighting, real time situational awareness is everything.”
He explained Nokia was focused on building out communications solutions based on 4G, 5G and future 6G for war fighters, giving military units “10 times the performance compared to the old military radios”.
Winning in 6G
6G was also a big topic during the two days in Oulu. Nokia revealed it is running proof of concept testing in Oulu using close to 7GHz frequencies across four test mobiles, assessing the behaviour in urban environments and how different attenuations effect the quality of signal.
For Uitto, the value of 6G could lie in an increase in capacity, even “if you don’t believe in any sort of killer application” emerging, which will be vital to cope with the ongoing boom in AI.
“In the future, a good part of the traffic growth will come from AI and what happens with this traffic growth. The modelling of Bell Labs shows that the uplink capacity of 5G and 5G-Advanced is not going to be enough. So, you need 6G simply because of the capacity reasons to be able to cater for this type of traffic increase.”
For Hotard, IP investment; radio investment and a push around a vision of the next-generation being more cloud and software driven is critical to the 6G journey.
He added access to open APIs would be an important aspect of 6G, while suggesting there needed to be learnings from the 5G and 4G eras with regards to generating capital.
“6G needs to provide new sources of monetisation, other than the network itself. And how the ecosystem plays and takes advantage of that is maybe still a question. But I think we have a great opportunity to win.”
