Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. He wasn't just smart in the way that academics are smart. He was also smart in the way that changes the world. He saw things no one else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid fixed telephone lines yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires of ideas and he understood how to love selling. No product is so good that it sells itself...
Every day Jan received a binder. Two full-time employees read all the world's most important newspapers and magazines for him and picked out what mattered. What others missed. The weak signals that foreshadow great changes. That made Jan know more about more than anyone else I ever met.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him — a modern version, global, AI-driven, available to everyone who wants something. Who dreams and has ambition. Jan would have loved it.
Jan Stenbeck var den smartaste personen jag någonsin träffat. Han var inte bara smart på det sättet som akademiker är smarta. Han var dessutom smart på det sätt som förändrar världen. Han såg saker ingen annan såg. Han förstod att mobiltelefoni skulle revolutionera länder som inte ens hade dragit fasta telefonlinjer ännu. Han bröt statliga socialistiska monopol när alla sa att det var omöjligt. Han byggde imperier av idéer och han förstod att älska försäljning. Ingen produkt är så bra att den säljer sig själv...
Varje dag fick Jan en pärmbok. Två heltidsanställda personer läste alla världens viktigaste tidningar och tidskrifter åt honom och plockade ut det som spelade roll. Det som andra missade. De svaga signalerna som förebådar stora förändringar. Det gjorde att Jan visste mer om mer än någon annan jag träffat.
Jag jobbade med Jan. Jag lärde mig av honom. Och jag har aldrig glömt den pärmboken. JansBrief är min hyllning till honom — en modern version, global, AI-driven, tillgänglig för alla som vill något. Som drömmer och har ambition. Jan skulle ha älskat det.
Johan Staël von Holstein
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
China's National Development and Reform Commission announces that Meta Platforms is prohibited from completing its $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus. It is more than a regulatory decision — it is a new doctrine.
Manus is formally registered in Singapore, but developed its products in China with Chinese engineers. Meta saw the acquisition as a way to access one of the most promising agent-based AI models in the world. Beijing had other plans.
Three things make this unique. The Singapore registration didn't help — country of registration is irrelevant; what matters is where the technology was created. Meta is not just any company — Zuckerberg's closeness to Trump does not protect him in Beijing. It accelerates AI nationalism on both sides.
There is a deep irony. DeepSeek publishes its most advanced model as open source for the entire world. At the same time, Beijing blocks the sale of Chinese AI expertise abroad. Open research, closed commerce.
In the short term Manus finds itself in a precarious position — the company has lost its largest potential buyer and every foreign investor now knows that Beijing has veto power.
In the medium term the trend accelerates: Chinese AI talents in Silicon Valley, London and Toronto find themselves caught in the middle. Their expertise is regarded as a national resource by Beijing, while their Western employers view them with increasing suspicion.
In the long term the rest of the world is forced to choose sides. India, UAE, Brazil, Indonesia — all with large populations and growing digital economies — face a choice reminiscent of Cold War bloc politics, but with higher stakes.
The Manus decision is the single moment that makes this reality impossible to ignore.
Sudan · Africa
In Labado in eastern Darfur, at least 70 people have died from measles — most of them children. A disease entirely preventable with a vaccine costing less than one dollar per dose. Sudan's civil war has completely destroyed the health infrastructure. WHO estimates Sudan has the world's fastest-growing humanitarian crisis.
Al Jazeera
Japan · Finance
Daiwa Securities acquires Orix Bank's operations for $2.3 billion — the company's largest acquisition in two decades. The same day, the Nikkei closes above 60,000 for the first time ever. Japan, after three decades of deflation and zero rates, is now acting with an aggressiveness not seen since the bubble era.
Bloomberg · Nikkei Asia
Turkey · Iran
Foreign Affairs analyses how the Iran war threatens Turkey despite Ankara trying to stay on the sidelines. Turkey shares a 534 km border with Iran, imports almost all its energy and has 15-20 million Kurds. Erdogan can neither support the US without risking chaos on his own doorstep, nor support Iran without losing Western capital. Silence is not a sustainable foreign policy.
Foreign Affairs
Pakistan · Diplomacy
Trump cancels the US negotiating team's trip to Pakistan. Iran's foreign minister flies instead to Moscow. Pakistan's mediation ambitions are buried. The country is simultaneously pressured by the UAE's demand for $3.5 billion back. Diplomatic space is shrinking in real time for a country balanced on the edge of economic collapse.
BBC · Bloomberg · Straits Times
India · Pharma
India's Sun Pharma acquires Organon in a shift from generics to patented specialist medicines. India has for decades been the world's pharmacy for cheap copies. Now they want to own the innovations instead of copying them. A fundamental change in India's role in the global pharmaceutical industry.
Nikkei Asia
Global · Hunger
The 2026 global food crises report shows acute food insecurity concentrated in ten countries. What is genuinely new: the Hormuz blockade creates a secondary hunger wave in Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan — countries that previously coped but are now pressured by rising energy and food prices. Hunger is now a direct result of global geopolitics.
Business Day Nigeria
China · LNG
China Merchants Heavy Industry delivers a 180,000 cubic metre LNG tanker. Five Chinese shipyards can now design and build these technically complex vessels. South Korea has dominated the market for decades. China's advance reduces dependence on foreign shipbuilding technology and strengthens energy security — particularly relevant after the Hormuz lesson.
South China Morning Post
France · Housing
Paris will use a new provision allowing municipalities to almost double the tax on vacant housing from 2027. An estimated 120,000 apartments stand empty while housing prices make the inner city inaccessible to the middle class. The model is being studied by Stockholm, Berlin and other cities with dysfunctional housing markets.
Le Monde
Mauritania · Culture
In Chinguetti — once the seventh holiest city in Islam and a medieval centre of learning — a single man fights to preserve Islamic manuscripts from the 9th century against sand and oblivion. No institution supports him. It is both a tribute to human tenacity and an indictment of collective indifference to cultural heritage outside the Western world's radar.
Al Jazeera
Truecaller, Stockholm's most remarkable consumer app, finds itself at a crossroads. TechCrunch reports that the company's growth has matured and it is now leaning on subscription revenues and enterprise services to find its next chapter.
The numbers tell the story: 400 million active users, India as the overwhelmingly largest market, an app so embedded in Indian everyday technology that it functions almost as a public utility. But when everyone who needs the app already has it — where does the next growth phase come from?
What makes this fascinating is the pattern it represents. A category of tech companies that became enormous by solving a specific problem, and that then discovers that solving the problem erodes its own reason for existing. Apple's iOS now has built-in spam filtering. Google Pixel automatically identifies unknown numbers.
Truecaller's answer is to transform itself from a tool to an infrastructure for digital identity — verified company identities in the call display in countries where state ID infrastructure is deficient. It is a fundamentally different business, and it has potentially higher margins. With 400 million users and a crowd-sourced database that is extremely difficult to replicate, the foundation is there. The question is whether the pivot succeeds.
Retail · Shanghai
Monocle reports that Shanghai's retail is experiencing a surge driven by independent shops, local design brands and pop-up concepts. In a world where e-commerce eats physical retail, Shanghai's streets fill with new energy. Consumers haven't stopped shopping — they've stopped accepting boring environments.
Design · New York
Dezeen and ICFF highlight thirteen lighting designers ahead of the Look Book in New York, 17-19 May. Lighting design has evolved from a functional category to an artistic discipline. Curated by Julia Haney Montanez, this year's selection focuses on sculptural light sources that blur the boundary between illumination and art.
Art · Auction
Artnet News reports that one of the most expensive Old Masters works sold at auction in 2025 is by an artist whose identity is still unknown. It challenges the entire art market's premise of provenance and name recognition — suggesting the market is maturing towards judging a work's inherent quality rather than the artist's brand.
Health · France
France begins covering the cost of cadmium testing, but doctors criticise the measure as overly restrictive. Studies show that a majority of French people have measurable levels of the carcinogenic heavy metal in their blood. The classic pattern in public health policy: acknowledge a problem just enough to show action, but not enough to reveal its full extent.
The Financial Times deep dive into China's military space programme reveals robotic arms that can grab enemy satellites, high-energy sensors that can blind them and weapons in orbit. The real problem: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibits weapons of mass destruction but says nothing about satellite capture or electronic jamming. We are in a legal vacuum resembling cyberwar ten years ago.
Financial TimesMIT Technology Review states we are in a new era of AI-driven fraud. Coordinated attacks combine grammatically perfect phishing emails, voice cloning of family members and deepfake video. Banks' security systems were built for a world where fraud was labour-intensive. In the new world it is capital-intensive but almost costless per unit.
MIT Technology ReviewArtnet News reports that auction app Fair Warning has launched AI-driven matching that bypasses the traditional auction process. Art Basel simultaneously restricts pre-sales. The combination points towards an art market moving towards more data-driven pricing — and raises the same transparency questions that algorithmic trading raised on Wall Street.
Artnet NewsBloomberg reports on private credit's rapid growth and growing concerns about defaults and transparency. Unlike public bond markets, private lending happens behind closed doors. Rising interest rates since 2022 pressure borrowers and rapid growth has led to falling credit standards. Losses could hit pension savers who never knew their money was invested in high-risk lending without public scrutiny.
Bloomberg120
Arrested in Hong Kong for online drug trafficking · SCMP
120 people arrested in a month-long operation against online drug trafficking in Hong Kong — of whom 14 were minors. 53.7 kilograms of dangerous substances seized, worth approximately HK$26 million.
14 of 120 were minors — a signal that digital drug dealing via encrypted apps and cryptocurrency has reached even one of Asia's most controlled cities.
Drug trafficking is undergoing the same digital transformation as legitimate trade. And just as with AI-driven fraud, the problem is that authorities' tools were built for an analogue reality. 14 minors in Hong Kong selling drugs online is not a local police story — it is a symptom of a global systemic change.
Put in perspective
Hong Kong historically had relatively low drug crime among young people thanks to strict laws and high social control. That 14 minors are now part of an organised online trading operation signals that digital infrastructure neutralises geographical and cultural protective mechanisms. Technology is value-neutral — it amplifies what already exists, whether good or evil.
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The world wants to force us all to choose sides. USA or China. AI-open or AI-closed. West or East. Pro or anti.
But the most interesting people — and the most successful societies — are those who refuse the false dichotomy. Singapore trades with everyone. Switzerland invests everywhere. The United Arab Emirates talks to all sides in every conflict.
This is sometimes called opportunism. I call it pragmatism. In a world where ideological loyalty becomes more expensive every day — where Pakistan is punished for trying to mediate, where Manus is punished for having been developed on Chinese soil — pragmatism is not moral weakness.
It is survival.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · Founder of JansBrief · wakopa.ai