Finnish city of Oulu reinvents itself as Nokia cuts staff

From early this month, 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 of a million, was once a key Nokia research and development site, before the mobile phone maker was left for dead in the global smartphone race by Apple's iPhone and handsets running 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 per cent 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, the buds of recovery are visible in Finland's biggest northern city, 600 kilometres 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 phone business and sell to Microsoft.