Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
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 with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 6 May 2026
The biggest available reduction in delivery emissions has nothing to do with electric trucks, drone drops or hydrogen fuel cells. It is about persuading competitors to share the same vehicle.
A sweeping new study of China's e-commerce delivery network — the largest parcel system on earth, handling over 150 billion packages a year — has found that the single most effective climate intervention is consolidating last-mile deliveries across rival couriers. Researchers modelled what happens when companies like SF Express, ZTO, YTO and STO pool their final-kilometre routes instead of each sending half-empty vans down the same streets. The results were striking: shared last-mile logistics cut carbon emissions per parcel by up to 30 per cent, dwarfing the gains from switching to electric vehicles alone.
The logic is brutally simple. In a typical Chinese city, four or five competing courier firms each run their own fleets through identical neighbourhoods, often within minutes of each other. Consolidation eliminates redundant trips. Fewer vehicles on the road means less fuel burned, less congestion, and fewer emissions — without requiring a single new technology.
This is not a theoretical exercise. China's State Post Bureau has been quietly pushing "shared delivery stations" in rural areas for years, where parcels from multiple couriers converge at a single village hub. The study suggests scaling this model to urban areas, where the waste is far greater. In some dense Chinese cities, the researchers found that five separate couriers were making deliveries to the same apartment block within the same two-hour window.
The resistance is predictable. Courier companies fear losing brand visibility and customer data. If your parcel arrives in a rival's van, whose app do you rate? Whose driver do you tip? The competitive moat of last-mile delivery is not speed or price — it is the relationship with the recipient's doorstep. Sharing that destroys a strategic asset.
But the climate arithmetic may force the issue. China's express delivery sector produces roughly 20 million tonnes of CO₂ annually. A 30 per cent reduction in last-mile emissions would be equivalent to taking several million cars off the road.
The implications extend far beyond China. Amazon, UPS, FedEx, DHL, Royal Mail and dozens of smaller players all run parallel last-mile networks across Western cities. European regulators have already started nudging logistics firms toward consolidation in city centres — Paris, Amsterdam and Barcelona have experimented with shared micro-hubs. But nowhere has the model been tested at the scale China's parcel system offers.
The deeper signal is philosophical. The tech industry's reflex is always to solve problems by inventing something new. A better battery. A smarter route algorithm. A flying drone. This study says the biggest available gain comes from something much older and much harder: getting competitors to cooperate. The technology already exists. The obstacle is institutional.
Jan Stenbeck would have spotted the paradox instantly. He spent his career breaking monopolies. But he also understood that infrastructure — whether telecom towers or delivery routes — works best when shared. The challenge is designing the sharing so it enables competition rather than suffocating it.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 5 May 2026
Short term (now–12 months): China's State Post Bureau is expected to release new guidelines on urban delivery consolidation later this year. If mandated, the country's six largest courier firms will need to negotiate shared routing agreements — a process that will test both antitrust frameworks and corporate willingness. European cities already piloting micro-hubs will watch closely. Investors in logistics-tech startups focused on route optimisation may find the market shifting toward consolidation platforms instead.
Medium term (1–3 years): If the Chinese model proves scalable, expect EU regulators to propose shared last-mile frameworks as part of urban clean-air directives. This could reshape the competitive landscape for DHL, DPD and national postal services across Europe. The economic incentive is there: shared delivery cuts costs by 15–20 per cent per parcel even before factoring in carbon pricing. Companies that resist may find themselves priced out by those that cooperate.
Long term (3–10 years): The principle — that cooperation between competitors can deliver larger environmental gains than technological substitution — could reshape climate policy beyond logistics. Energy grids, water infrastructure, agricultural supply chains: all sectors where parallel systems create redundant emissions. The political difficulty is enormous. But if a country as fiercely competitive as China can make shared delivery work at urban scale, the argument that markets require wasteful duplication starts to crumble. Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 5 May 2026 ---
Nigeria's major banks — including GTBank, FCMB and First Bank — have launched a direct offensive into the N400 billion airtime lending market long dominated by telecoms operators. The banks are offering lower interest rates on micro-loans for airtime and data top-ups, undercutting the telcos' lucrative side business. For years, companies like MTN and Airtel used airtime advances as a gateway to broader financial services for unbanked Nigerians. The banks' counter-move threatens that foothold and signals a new phase in the battle for Nigeria's vast informal financial market. With over 40 million Nigerians using airtime-based lending, the stakes are significant. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 5 May 2026
President Bernardo Arévalo has named Gabriel Estuardo García Luna — a former judge and university professor — as Guatemala's new attorney general. The appointment is a crucial test for Arévalo's anti-corruption agenda. His presidency has been under constant pressure from entrenched interests in the country's judicial establishment since he took office. The attorney general controls prosecutorial power in a country where previous holders of the office have used it both to fight and to protect corruption networks. García Luna's academic background signals Arévalo wants a technocrat, not a political operator. Source: Straits Times · 5 May 2026
Philippine Senator Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa — the former police chief who was the public face of Rodrigo Duterte's deadly drug war — has not shown up for work in six months. The reason: reports that the International Criminal Court may seek his arrest. Dela Rosa was once the most visible enforcer of a campaign that killed thousands of Filipinos. His paid absence from the Senate is drawing fire from colleagues and activists alike, a reminder that the ICC's long arm still shapes domestic politics in Manila even without a single arrest executed on Philippine soil. Source: South China Morning Post · 6 May 2026
Cuba's government has pushed back against US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's claim that there is "no oil blockade on Cuba, per se." Havana says the statement is a deliberate lie, pointing to intensified US sanctions that have made it nearly impossible for tankers to deliver fuel to the island. Cuba's energy crisis has worsened sharply this year, with daily blackouts lasting up to 18 hours in some provinces. The diplomatic spat comes as Washington's focus on Iran has drawn attention away from its maximum-pressure campaign in the Caribbean. Source: Straits Times · 5 May 2026
Three days after a combined FLA and JNIM offensive that killed Defence Minister General Sadio Camara, junta leader Assimi Goïta has finally broken his silence. But the crisis has exposed deep fissures within the military regime. The offensive revealed structural weaknesses: poor intelligence, weak command chains, and growing reliance on militia groups the army cannot control. Goïta's delayed response has fuelled speculation about power struggles at the top. Mali's situation is deteriorating faster than its neighbours or Western partners seem willing to acknowledge. Source: The Africa Report · 5 May 2026
Kenyan President William Ruto projects that bilateral trade with Tanzania will surpass $1 billion in 2026 — a milestone for East African integration. The growth is driven by expanding investment flows, infrastructure links and deeper ties within the East African Community. For a region where intra-African trade has historically been dwarfed by trade with Europe and China, the Kenya–Tanzania corridor is becoming a proof of concept for the African Continental Free Trade Area's promise. Source: Mail and Guardian (SA) · 5 May 2026
The Pentagon confirmed that five more people died in US strikes on alleged narco-trafficking vessels off Latin America. The campaign's cumulative death toll has now reached 190. The operations, conducted largely in Caribbean and Pacific waters, have drawn little international scrutiny relative to their scale. For the affected communities in Central America and the Caribbean, the strikes blur the line between counter-narcotics enforcement and an undeclared war. Source: Straits Times · 5 May 2026
Russian strikes across eastern Ukraine killed at least 27 people on Tuesday — one of the deadliest days this year — just hours before rival ceasefire proposals from Kyiv and Moscow were set to take effect. Russia's ceasefire covers May 8–9, coinciding with Victory Day celebrations. Ukraine proposed an open-ended ceasefire. The juxtaposition of mass killing and peace gestures captures the grim choreography of this war: every escalation is paired with a performance of reasonableness. Source: South China Morning Post · 6 May 2026 ---
In Caracas, a converted bus called Panarosa rolls through the city's roughest streets offering something that barely exists for Venezuela's homeless women: gynaecological care.
The bus is staffed by nursing assistants and doctors. Women board it expecting nothing — many have never had a check-up. They receive reproductive health screenings, contraception counselling and basic treatment. The project was born from a simple observation: homeless women in Caracas face catastrophic health risks that the formal healthcare system, itself in collapse, has no capacity or will to address.
Venezuela's humanitarian crisis has pushed an estimated seven million people out of the country and left those who remain navigating a hollowed-out state. The public hospital system lacks basic supplies. For women living on the streets, a visit to a clinic is often impossible — either because they lack documents, because they fear being turned away, or because the clinic has no equipment.
Panarosa bypasses all of that. It goes to where the women are. The model is low-tech and high-trust: a known vehicle, a known team, a regular route. There is no app, no platform, no venture funding. There is a bus, a nurse, and the decision to show up.
Jan Stenbeck liked people who built things that worked in places where nothing worked. He would have recognised the Panarosa team as operators — people who solve logistics problems because they care about the humans at the end of the route. He launched Metro, the free newspaper, on the same principle: go to where the readers are, not where the advertisers want them to be. Panarosa goes to where the patients are.
The project also carries a quiet political charge. In a country where the Maduro regime claims to provide universal healthcare, a bus run by volunteers is a living rebuke — proof that the state's promises are hollow. That kind of entrepreneurial defiance, building the service the government won't, is exactly what Jan admired.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 5 May 2026
At this year's Venice Biennale, artist Sung Tieu has transformed the exterior of Germany's pavilion — a building redesigned under the Nazis in 1938 — while the late Henrike Naumann's final work turns inward, exploring the politics embedded in domestic furniture and interior design. Germany's entry is an act of architectural self-interrogation, confronting the fascist bones of the building rather than pretending they are neutral. In a biennale season already fraught with political controversy, the German pavilion asks the most uncomfortable question: what do you do with a monument you cannot demolish? Source: Artnet News · 5 May 2026
The Italian painter Domenico Gnoli, who died in 1970 at just 37, is getting a fresh reappraisal. His dizzying close-ups of everyday objects — a tie knot, a bedsheet, a collar button — transform the mundane into alien landscapes. The work sits at the intersection of Pop Art and hyperrealism but belongs to neither camp. Gnoli painted surfaces so obsessively that they became abstractions. In an era drowning in AI-generated imagery, his hand-painted precision feels almost subversive. Source: The New Yorker · 5 May 2026
Students at Concordia University in Montreal have converted the Kevlar fabric from the Montreal Olympic Stadium's infamous retractable roof — one of the great engineering debacles of the twentieth century — into furniture, wearables and design objects. The O-cycle Project, led by designer Jeremy Petrus, exhibited the pieces during Montreal Design Week. The stadium's roof was plagued by tears and collapses for decades. Turning its material into chairs is a witty act of architectural redemption. Source: Dezeen · 5 May 2026
A landmark collection of Benjamin Franklin books, broadsides, letters and manuscripts — valued at $3–4.5 million — is heading to auction at Sotheby's. The trove spans Franklin's careers as printer, diplomat, scientist and founding father. In a market where contemporary art dominates auction headlines, a collection of 18th-century paper ephemera offers a reminder that the rarest things are often the most fragile. Source: Artnet News · 5 May 2026
The Milan studio of the late Italian designer Vico Magistretti — creator of the Atollo lamp, the Maralunga sofa and dozens of other icons — has reopened as a foundation, museum and working archive. The Fondazione Vico Magistretti connects his legacy to students and young designers, with exhibits tracing his global influences. In a city saturated with design tourism, this is the rare space that treats design history as a living discipline rather than a showroom. Source: Monocle · 5 May 2026
In northeast Thailand, Buddhist temples gathered for the annual "Look Noo" rocket festival — a tradition rooted in ancient Mon culture where communities build and fire homemade rockets to summon rain. The festival is simultaneously sacred and wildly competitive, with temples vying for the highest launch. In a region battered by erratic monsoons, the ritual is gaining new resonance as climate change makes the rains less predictable. Source: Al Jazeera · 5 May 2026 ---
A new analysis from Rest of World documents how restricted access to the most powerful AI-based defensive tools — such as Anthropic's Mythos security suite — is creating a widening cybersecurity gap between rich and poor nations. As AI-powered attacks surge globally, the countries and institutions most vulnerable to them are precisely those least able to acquire the AI tools needed to defend against them. Central banks in sub-Saharan Africa, small financial institutions in Southeast Asia and government agencies across Latin America find themselves outgunned. The problem mirrors an older pattern in the arms trade: the most advanced weapons go to those who need them least. But in cybersecurity, the consequences compound. A successful attack on a central bank in a low-income country doesn't just steal money — it can destabilise an entire economy. Meanwhile, the NHS in Britain has taken the opposite tack, pulling its open-source code from the internet specifically because of fears that AI models like Mythos could be used to find vulnerabilities. Critics say the move hurts transparency without improving security. Source: Rest of World · 5 May 2026; New Scientist · 5 May 2026
SAP's decision to acquire Prior Labs — a German AI startup barely eighteen months old — for $1.16 billion is one of the largest bets by a European enterprise software company on home-grown AI. Prior Labs, spun out of German academic research, has developed foundational models for tabular data — the kind of structured information that runs inside every SAP customer's enterprise resource planning system. The acquisition signals that SAP believes the next wave of AI value lies not in chatbots or image generators but in the mundane, critical work of making sense of corporate databases. SAP is also restricting which third-party AI agents its customers can use, allowing only a curated set including Nvidia's NemoClaw — a move that suggests enterprise AI is heading toward walled gardens, not open ecosystems. Source: TechCrunch · 5 May 2026
For half a century, physicists have tried to create a quantum spin liquid — a state of matter where quantum entanglement persists throughout a solid material rather than freezing into an ordered pattern. Lab attempts have been extraordinarily difficult. Now a researcher reports finding naturally occurring quantum spin liquids in crystals buried in the earth. If confirmed, this would be a landmark in condensed matter physics, suggesting that nature has been growing one of quantum computing's most sought-after states of matter all along — no cleanroom required. Source: New Scientist · 5 May 2026 ---
30
30%
That is the reduction in carbon emissions per parcel achievable through shared last-mile delivery in Chinese cities, according to the new study of the country's e-commerce logistics network. For context, switching an entire delivery fleet to electric vehicles typically yields a 20–25 per cent emissions reduction — and costs billions in capital investment. Cooperation between competitors costs almost nothing in hardware. It costs everything in ego. The number captures a broader truth about climate action: the cheapest, fastest gains are often organisational, not technological. They require redesigning incentives, not inventing machines. China's 150-billion-parcel-a-year system is the world's largest laboratory for this idea. If 30 per cent works there, it works everywhere.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 5 May 2026
In perspective
That is the reduction in carbon emissions per parcel achievable through shared last-mile delivery in Chinese cities, according to the new study of the country's e-commerce logistics network. For context, switching an entire delivery fleet to electric vehicles...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Every time the climate debate gets stuck I hear the same refrain: we need new technology, we need more money, we need a breakthrough. And sure, technology matters. But that study on China's parcel logistics says something that should be embarrassingly obvious. Having competing courier companies share the same van on the last mile cuts emissions by 30 percent per package. Not by inventing anything new, but by stopping doing the same thing five times over on the same street within the same hour.
That's not a technical insight. It's an organizational one. And that's precisely why it meets resistance, because it demands that companies give up a piece of their ego, their logo on the van, their illusion of control at the customer's door. Technology you can buy. Collaboration you have to negotiate, and that's harder.
I've built companies my whole life and I know that competition drives innovation. But I also know that infrastructure works best when it's shared. Telecom towers, power grids, delivery routes. The point isn't to abolish competition but to compete at the right level. Compete on the service, not on who drives the most half-empty vans through the same neighborhood.
The cheapest climate wins don't require new machines. They require grown adults to sit down at the same table.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai