Nokia is shutting down virtually every remaining operation it has in mainland China, completing what the South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday as a full Nokia mainland China exit 2026. The decision, confirmed by a Nokia spokesperson to Reuters, sweeps well beyond the Hangzhou radio technology lab that drew attention last week and closes sites in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Qingdao, and beyond. Only after-sales support functions are expected to remain once the phased cuts, structured in batches through December 31, are complete.
The Hangzhou facility had been Nokia’s most substantial research hub in China, developing radio technology at the core of its AirScale 5G base stations. Its roughly 1,600 positions were the first to go after staff were told via internal video conference from Helsinki on August 13. What the South China Morning Post confirmed this week is that the Hangzhou closure was not a standalone event. One Shanghai-based source described the broader plan as “basically a gradual exit from the market,” and Nokia’s spokesperson acknowledged that the company is “adjusting our operational footprint in China to address this reality” after sustained business decline.
The revenue record behind the move is unambiguous. In 2018, Nokia’s Greater China region generated nearly €2.2 billion in annual revenues. By 2025, that figure had dropped to €913 million, a 58% decline in seven years, including a 19% drop in 2025 alone. Nokia employed roughly 7,200 people across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at the end of 2025, and the full mainland closure will eliminate the majority of that headcount across both mobile networks and network infrastructure divisions. The staged layoffs affect operations tied to Nokia Shanghai Bell, the joint venture that dates back to 1984 and once anchored the Finnish vendor’s presence in the country.
Nokia’s ADR shares fell nearly 4% in premarket trading to approximately $10.38 in early Tuesday action. The business collapse was not purely a product-competitiveness failure. By September 2025, Nokia executives told journalists in Oulu that the company had received signals it was being excluded from China on national-security grounds, the mirror image of how Western governments have treated Huawei. Tommi Uitto, then Nokia’s mobile networks president, said it directly at the Oulu press conference. Nokia’s combined RAN share with Ericsson had fallen to 3%, prompting Dell’Oro analyst Stefan Pongratz to describe the two vendors’ China footprint as “negligible.”
CEO Justin Hotard has named the resulting asymmetry with precision. “Why do we allow high-risk vendors in Europe in our networks, particularly when they don’t allow us to play in their markets?” he asked publicly, noting that Nokia and Ericsson together hold less than 3% of China’s radio access network market while Huawei alone accounts for roughly 59% of Germany’s installed 5G base stations. Germany’s government has mandated that operators reduce Chinese vendor components to a maximum of 25% by October 1, 2026, a cutoff now fewer than six weeks away, even as the EU’s 5G security toolbox has been implemented by only 13 of 27 member states. Ericsson’s own arc tracks Nokia’s closely: a SEK 18.7 billion China peak in 2020 collapsed after Sweden banned Huawei from its 5G networks.
The strategic loss is specific in a way that the revenue numbers alone do not capture. AI-RAN, the fusion of artificial intelligence with radio access networks, depends on training-grade data drawn from live commercial deployments, the kind of traffic patterns and field conditions that 6G standardization work will require. Cutting off mainland China forecloses that channel at exactly the moment research windows are narrowing. The full Nokia mainland China exit 2026 hands that advantage to domestic vendors and leaves European operators debating Huawei Germany 5G replacement timelines without the data depth their rivals now control.
The financial picture behind the mainland China pullback is increasingly defined by where Nokia is winning rather than where it is retreating. In Q2 2026, Nokia reported roughly €2.8 billion in AI and cloud-related order intake, a figure executives have leaned on to argue that the company’s future lies with hyperscaler-aligned networks and AI-RAN workloads rather than legacy carrier rollouts in restricted geographies. That €2.8 billion is being deployed against a competitive backdrop Hotard has framed in starkly asymmetric terms: Nokia and Ericsson together hold less than 3% of China’s radio access network market, while Huawei alone accounts for roughly 59% of Germany’s installed 5G base stations. The same vendor effectively shut out of Western capitals is structurally embedded in the heart of European telecom infrastructure.
Germany’s October 1, 2026 vendor cutoff deadline is the mechanism designed to break that asymmetry. Under the schedule agreed in Berlin, high-risk vendors must have critical management functions removed from German 5G core networks by that date, with RAN-level restrictions tightening into 2029. For Nokia, the timing is consequential because the same German carriers that will need to replace Huawei-equipped base stations are also the buyers weighing Nokia’s AI-RAN pitches. The Hangzhou lab closure, however, severs a critical data channel for that competition. AirScale 5G base station R&D, real-world field telemetry from Chinese carrier deployments, and the carrier-grade operational data sets that train AI-RAN scheduling models were all concentrated at the Hangzhou site. The implications for Nokia mainland China exit 2026 are direct: a vendor that once held the third-largest position inside China is now structurally outside it, training its 6G AI-RAN systems without the field telemetry that shaped the 5G era.