Salora grew into one of Finland's serious consumer-electronics firms. FM radios arrived in 1953, black-and-white television production in 1957, hi-fi systems a decade later. The company's showpiece was the Salora Finlandia colour television of 1968, which took a gold medal at the Nuremberg international inventors' fair the following year — no small thing for a manufacturer from a town of a few tens of thousands. Less visible, and far more consequential, was the quieter line the firm had opened in the early 1960s: radiotelephones for the military and the emergency services. Salo was learning how to put a radio transmitter in a box a person could carry, decades before anyone thought of that as a consumer proposition.

In 1979 Salora and Nokia formed a joint venture, Mobira, to build handsets for the Nordic Mobile Telephone network, the automatic cellular system that opened across the Nordic countries in 1981 and let a phone cross a border without losing its call. Nokia bought out Mobira in 1982 and absorbed Salora itself in 1989, and by then the direction of travel was set. Nokia had begun making mobile phones in Salo in 1981. A new 15,000-square-metre plant opened in June 1995 with 1,200 people working in it and products going to seventy countries. By 2008 the site employed 5,000. The phones that turned up in pockets from Manila to Manchester in those years were, to a remarkable degree, assembled in this one small Finnish river town, and the town built its schools, its services and its expectations on that fact.

In 2010 Nokia accounted for 95 per cent of Salo's corporate tax income — about 60 million euros. Two years later that figure was 14 million. The collapse was as fast as the boom had been: facing heavy losses in 2012, Nokia laid off a third of its 3,500-strong Salo workforce and moved manufacturing to Asia, and by the end of that year the town no longer made hardware at all, retaining only a research and development centre. When the site passed to Microsoft Mobile the layoffs continued, and in June 2015 Microsoft announced it would close the plant, putting 1,100 jobs at risk. Unemployment in Salo already stood at 15 per cent, with forecasts of 20. Finland was still climbing out of the post-2008 slump, and politicians from across the spectrum made a point of saying Salo's name out loud.

What Salo had left after 2015 was not nothing: buildings, infrastructure, and several thousand people who knew how to run a precision production line. Those assets pulled in other companies, and the town has kept going without pretending the old scale will return. Its population stood at 50,339 at the end of 2025, making it the twentieth-largest municipality in Finland — a slow decline rather than a rout. Salo has also become notably less homogeneous than it once was. Some 4,456 residents were born abroad, about nine per cent of the total, with 3,350 holding foreign citizenship, and the share is rising because newcomers now make up a growing part of everyone who moves in. In 2023 the Evangelical Lutheran Church counted 70.4 per cent of residents, other faiths 1.8 per cent, and 27.8 per cent belonged to nothing at all.

The event that now draws crowds to Salo has nothing to do with technology. Each autumn the Kurpitsaviikot — Pumpkin Weeks — fill a field at Halikko with thousands of pumpkins and carved lanterns glowing through the long Finnish dusk. It began small and got completely out of hand, pulling visitors from Hanko in the far south to Ivalo above the Arctic Circle, and drawing notice as far away as North America. In October 2025 the Pumpkin Park was opened officially by Sauli Niinistö, Finland's twelfth president, who served from 2012 to 2024 and who was born in Salo in 1948. There is something fitting about a town that once shipped the world's phones now being known for a field full of candlelit squash, and about the whole thing being taken entirely seriously. Salo also fields the Salon Vilpas Vikings in Korisliiga, Finland's top basketball division, at the Salohalli.