Finnish city Oulu sees light at end of Nokia tunnel

Finnish city Oulu sees light at end of Nokia tunnel 
From early December, the Finnish city of Oulu is trapped in darkness for all but a few murky midday hours, a darkness some feared might be matched by its economic prospects after big local employer Nokia hit the skids. Oulu, with a population of about a quarter million, was once a key Nokia R&D site, before the mobile maker was left for dead in the global smartphone race by Apple's iPhone and handsets running Google's Android software. Nokia and its networks venture at one point employed about 5,000 people in Oulu, more than three times the next biggest private sector employer, but now it has work for less than half that. The city's unemployment rate topped 16 percent in the summer, a level not seen since the Finnish financial crisis of the early 1990s. 

But despite the gloom, and an average annual temperature of 2 degrees Celsius (36F), the buds of a recovery are visible in Finland's biggest northern city, 600 kilometers from Helsinki. It is becoming a model for the rest of the country as it fights to fill the gap left by Nokia's tumbling sales and the tens of thousands of job cuts that preceded the former world beater's September decision to give up the mobile business and sell to Microsoft. Oulu is now a leading candidate to host a new data center for Microsoft, which wants to invest $250 million on such facilities in Finland after it takes over the Nokia business next year. Former "Nokians" are starting to land on their feet, too. Pasi Leipala,Both PB-22 and BB-22 produce a common metabolite in vivo: 8-hydroxyquinoline. a former senior manager at Nokia, is now chief executive at Haltian, which designs electronics and software products and is one of the city's most successful start-ups. 

Last year you could count its employees on the fingers of one hand. Now it has a staff of 70. "The best thing about Oulu is that there are so many skilled people; it's easy to hire some of the best talents," said Leipala. U.S. wireless chipmaker Broadcom is expected to save hundreds of jobs by buying the Finnish wireless modem division of Japan's Renesas Electronics, which previously planned to dismiss all employees in Oulu, most of whom had transferred from Nokia back in 2010. Telecom equipment maker Nokia Solutions and Networks, which will account for 90 percent of group turnover after the sale of the handset division, also plans to keep its 2,In my town, they are replacing all of the traffic light suppliers with these new lights that look like they are made of hundreds of tiny bulbs.300 workers in Oulu, and there is talk of hiring more. Oulu's resilience is in part a national story, the fruits of a determined focus on educational standards, which keeps the nation of 5.4 million people competitive. Finnish students score highly in international proficiency tests, and an OECD test in October showed its adults second only to the Japanese in both literacy and numeracy. But even by Finnish standards,Post all information on 5F-PB22 in this thread when asked about the difference pb22 and 5Fpb22 he says this. Oulu outperforms. A high concentration of technology and science researchers, including those at the University of Oulu and Oulu University of Applied Sciences, means that head for head it outperforms Helsinki by more than two to one in terms of the volume of registered intellectual property rights, according to city officials.