Helsinki, June 1, 2026, 13:02 EEST
- Nokia rose more than 5% in Helsinki trading, outpacing the OMX Helsinki 25 index.
- A May 31 filing showed senior manager Victoria Hanrahan bought 44,682 Nokia shares on the NYSE.
- The rally still rests on an older but powerful theme: demand for AI and cloud-networking gear.
Nokia Oyj shares climbed on Monday, rebounding from Friday’s sharp fall, as investors kept chasing the Finnish network equipment maker’s artificial intelligence story and digested a fresh management share-purchase disclosure.
The Helsinki-listed stock was up 5.39% at 13.16 euros at 06:02 a.m. EDT, after closing at 12.49 euros on Friday, when it fell 6.27%, MarketScreener data showed. The OMX Helsinki 25 index was up 0.64% at 6,510.45, according to Nasdaq index data.
The move mattered because Nokia has become a high-beta way to trade AI infrastructure in Europe. High beta means a stock tends to move more sharply than the broader market. Its shares are up more than 130% this year, a run that has made each new order, insider filing or analyst comment count for more than it normally might.
Helsinki was in a regular trading session. Nasdaq lists Helsinki equity trading hours at 10:00 to 18:30 local time, and June 1 is not among its 2026 Helsinki market holidays.
Nokia said in a May 31 managers’ transaction filing that Victoria Hanrahan, listed as an “other senior manager,” acquired 44,682 shares on the New York Stock Exchange across transactions dated May 26 and May 28. The disclosed weighted average price was $15.8117, putting the purchase value at about $706,500. Nokia Corporation | Nokia
The filing is not big enough on its own to explain the stock’s broader rally. It is, however, fresh tape in a market already primed to reward signs that management is leaning into the same AI-linked thesis investors have been buying.
Nokia’s first-quarter report remains the main plank. The company said comparable net sales — sales adjusted to make periods more like-for-like — rose 4% on a constant currency and portfolio basis, while sales to AI and cloud customers rose 49%. It booked 1 billion euros of orders from those customers in the quarter.
“We are increasing our growth assumption for Optical and IP Networks and we are investing to capture accelerating demand from AI & Cloud customers,” Chief Executive Justin Hotard said in that report. Optical networks carry large volumes of data over fibre; IP networks route internet traffic.
Hotard also said demand had accelerated since Nokia’s November capital markets day, lifting the company’s view of the AI and cloud addressable market to 27% compound annual growth from 2025 to 2028, up from an earlier 16% estimate. Compound annual growth is the smoothed yearly growth rate over a period.
Reuters reported in April that Nokia’s comparable operating profit — an adjusted profit measure that excludes some one-off items — jumped 54% to 281 million euros in the first quarter, above the 250 million euros expected by analysts polled by Infront. The results sent the shares to their highest level since April 2010.
Analysts have focused on the optical and internet protocol businesses, not the older mobile-network gear alone. Inderes analyst Atte Riikola said the key point from the results was “a clear increase in the growth outlook for optical and internet protocol networks,” while Jefferies analyst Janardan Menon pointed to Nokia’s 45.5% gross margin, above a 42.9% expectation cited in the same report. TradingView
The competitive read-across is also firmer than it was a year ago. In MarketScreener’s sector comparison, Cisco, Arista Networks and Ericsson were all higher on Monday, though Nokia’s move was larger than each of those peers. That suggests the day’s trade was not only about Nokia, but Nokia had the sharper stock-specific move.
But the risk is plain. A stock that has more than doubled this year has less room for a messy quarter, a delay in hyperscaler spending, or another weak patch in telecom operators’ capital expenditure. Nokia itself said its outlook is forward-looking and subject to risks and uncertainties, and its fixed networks sales fell in the first quarter as the company shifted toward higher-margin products.
For now, the next hard checkpoint is July. Nokia’s financial calendar lists its second-quarter and half-year report for July 23, when investors will get a cleaner test of whether Monday’s bounce is still backed by orders, margins and cash flow — not just a hot AI tape.
