Few Nordic finance leaders have seen as many industries from the CFO chair as Pia Aaltonen-Forsell. Forestry at Munksjö and Ahlstrom Munksjö. Steel at Outokumpu. Batteries at Northvolt. Aviation at Finnair. She chairs UPM’s Audit Committee, and by January she takes on her next role as CFO of Valmet.

Each industry has its own logic, its own cycles, its own shocks. Yet across all of them, Finnair CFO Aaltonen-Forsell says, the fundamentals that decide whether a company survives disruption barely change.

"We just have to accept the world as it is. There are surprises, there is volatility, and we have to build the way we think, the frameworks we use and the way we act around that," the financial leader of Finland’s flag carrier told Listeds in an exclusive interview.

Before joining Finnair as CFO in 2024, Aaltonen-Forsell held senior finance roles at Vacon, Munksjö, Ahlstrom Munksjö, Outokumpu and Northvolt. She also chairs UPM's Audit Committee and will become CFO of industrial technology supplier Valmet by next January. The experience has shown that resilience depends less on accurate forecasts than on preserving the flexibility to adapt.

Few companies have tested that idea as thoroughly as Finnair. Russia's closure of its airspace dismantled the airline's long-standing advantage on Europe-Asia routes almost overnight, forcing longer flight times and a fundamental rethink of its network. More recently, conflict in the Middle East triggered another wave of disruption as oil prices climbed and airlines adjusted operations.

Many carriers felt the impact immediately. Scandinavian Airlines canceled hundreds of flights because of higher fuel costs. Finnair largely avoided cancellations and fuel surcharges, helped by a fuel hedging strategy that had locked in much of its fuel costs before prices surged. At the same time, reduced capacity from several Middle Eastern airlines increased demand on long-haul routes to Asia, supporting a record comparable operating profit of €78.4 million in the second quarter and prompting Finnair to raise its revenue guidance for 2026.

For Aaltonen-Forsell, the lesson is not how Finnair handled one disruption but how it prepared for many.

Optionality is a strategy

Ask Aaltonen-Forsell what resilience means, and the seasoned CFO starts with the balance sheet.

"From my perspective, resilience means that you have a certain readiness through the structure of your balance sheet, your cash reserves, your factual understanding of the situation, your shared knowledge and your shared view of the situation."

Preparation, however, is only part of the equation. "Because things can change, part of resilience is having that optionality. Not just saying, 'Here's the only right way to do it,' but thinking upfront that there may be two different alternatives. Depending on how things go, we can go this way, or we can go that way."

Few industries feel geopolitical shocks as quickly as aviation. When the Strait of Hormuz closed in late February, global jet fuel prices nearly doubled within weeks, reaching $188 a barrel in April. They eased briefly before jumping almost 30% again in July as renewed tensions disrupted shipping. For the airline industry, the volatility is expected to add around $100 billion to fuel bills this year.

It is why Aaltonen-Forsell returns to the idea of optionality. Rather than betting on a single forecast, companies need enough financial and operational flexibility to change course as conditions shift.

A veteran finance executive, Pia Aaltonen-Forsell has held CFO roles at Finnair, Northvolt, Outokumpu, Ahlstrom-Munksjö, and Vacon, alongside board appointments at several listed companies. Image credit: Finnair

Managing risk without predicting it

Airlines take different approaches to fuel price risk. Some, including American Airlines, have largely abandoned fuel hedging. Most European network carriers continue to hedge, although to varying degrees.

Finnair follows the latter approach. The airline relies on a hedging policy, but Aaltonen-Forsell says it still requires a close understanding of market conditions.

"We have a hedging policy that really gives us direction. But we also need to have our feet on the ground and understand the market. In very volatile markets, it's not a thing that you just call the bank and say, 'I would like to do this.' You still need to be very informed about what's going on and choose the right moments."

The strategy proved its value this summer. By the end of the second quarter, Finnair had hedged roughly three-quarters of its expected fuel consumption for the second half of the year, reducing its exposure as prices rose.

That discipline matters because markets rarely move in predictable ways. "You need to have a certain framework for your thinking. It can't jump around day to day based on the latest news or tweet. Here's the basic plan. Then here are some things we could potentially change in different situations."

Rather than reacting to each headline, whether a breakthrough in peace talks or a fresh escalation, Finnair follows a defined framework while adjusting its decisions as conditions evolve.

Panu Porkka was named CEO of the Year at the Nordic Listed Leaders Gala. He talks about the people he leans on, what he looks for in a leader, and why he thinks Finland could use a little more Swedishness.

When Panu Porkka stepped up to accept CEO of the Year 2025 at the Nordic Listed Leaders Gala, he didn’t talk much about himself; instead, he talked about his wife and his team. It was a telling choice for a man who runs one of the most closely watched retailer companies on the Nasdaq Helsinki, and a useful place to start, because the way Porkka leads has a lot to do with the people he chooses to lean on.

"I would not be sane without my wife," he says. Across the phases of a demanding career, she has, in his telling, made his personal and professional growth possible. The work of a listed-company chief executive is, by his own account, sometimes very lonely. 

What carries him through the dark stretches is having someone who reminds him he has done his best. With two children, aged five and seven, the ambition at home is shared too: to be as good a father as the hours allow. It is, he says, team play on both sides, and most of it sits in a place that never shows up in the work or on the newspaper pages.

A team that carries the weight

Ask what makes the job rewarding, and the answer is one word: team. Porkka describes a management group he rates as genuinely professional, working to a clear shared agenda and, crucially, carrying responsibility together rather than waiting to be told. 

The phrase he keeps returning to is shared ownership. The overlap between people, the way one steps in where another leaves off, would not function, he says, without it. 

Like-minded people, excited about the same thing, supporting each other and taking the weight: that is what turns a lonely job into a workable one.

It is also the lens through which he reads talent. Asked what he looks for, Porkka does not hesitate. Attitude is, by a distance, the most important quality: the drive to take hold of a problem and solve it, the instinct to say "I will handle that," the ability to get things done and bring people along. 

Curiosity is the second component, a genuine appetite to learn, to stay open, to ask the other person to tell you more, and to want to understand not just what they think but why. Over 25 years, he has come to trust those two signals above almost anything on a CV.

The German lesson

Much of how Porkka works was shaped in Germany.  Porkka spent around eight years with Lidl, much of it in Finland and later in Germany, where he steered international sales for Northern Europe and later ran Swiss operations as chief operating officer, including a market opening there. 

Germany was never foreign to him: he attended the German School of Helsinki, the language and culture are familiar, and the country is something of a second home.

The management culture left a mark. German business, as he describes it, is matter-of-fact, with the substance of the task firmly in the foreground. It prizes anticipation and planning, treats chance as something to be designed out, and rewards working out what you are trying to achieve before you set off to measure it. 

After Lidl, Porkka spent four years at Tokmanni, after which he made a move into specialty retail as chief executive of the Finnish bookshop chain Suomalainen Kirjakauppa.

No hundred-day plan

Porkka did not arrive at Verkkokauppa.com with a 100-day checklist. He joined the board in April 2017 and became CEO in March 2018, succeeding founder Samuli Seppälä, who had led the company for 26 years and built it from a basement startup into one of Finland's most recognizable retail brands before moving to the board.

There was no formal brief beyond the obvious one: growth had begun to slow, and the company needed to find its next chapter.

What Porkka inherited was a business shaped by an entrepreneurial culture that had been one of its greatest strengths. Seppälä's willingness to challenge convention, move quickly, and back bold ideas had helped create a company that stood apart from its competitors. Much of the spirit that defined Verkkokauppa.com, from its relentless focus on customers to its appetite for unconventional bets, was a direct product of its founder.

The challenge was that success had also created a company that still operated much like a fast-growing startup. Many decisions, processes, and ways of working reflected years of founder-led growth. Porkka's task was not to replace that culture but to preserve its strengths while building an organization that could scale beyond any one individual.

That meant developing a stronger management structure, broadening ownership across the leadership team, documenting processes, and introducing systems that made performance more transparent for investors and analysts. 

It was as much a cultural transition as an operational one: moving from a founder-led organization to a more distributed model of leadership without losing the ambition and boldness that had made the company successful in the first place. 

Chinese courts have ruled that AI adoption alone does not justify dismissing workers. Finnish employers have far broader discretion — but the legal risk emerges earlier than many boards realize.

When a Hangzhou tech company tried to replace its AI quality-assurance supervisor with a large language model — offering him a 40% pay cut to a different role, then firing him when he refused — China's courts ruled the dismissal illegal. The Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court decision, published in late April as part of a set of typical AI-related labor cases, established a principle now drawing international attention: AI adoption alone does not justify firing workers.

Finnish employers operate under very different rules, but the underlying question Chinese courts raised is one Finnish boards will face soon, if they aren't facing it already: at what point does deploying AI shift from being a productivity-driven investment to a decision that results in a reduction of the workforce?

"There is no black and white answer to that," says Sanna Honkinen, head of employment practice at Hannes Snellman. And that ambiguity, she warns, is where the legal risk lives.

The Chinese precedent

The Hangzhou ruling, upheld on appeal on April 28, centered on a quality assurance supervisor identified only as Zhou. Hired in 2022 at a monthly salary of 25,000 yuan (USD3,676) to oversee his employer's AI output, Zhou was told in 2025 that the company intended to replace his role with a large language model. He was offered a different position at 15,000 yuan — a 40% pay cut — and dismissed when he refused.

The Intermediate People's Court ruled that AI-driven job replacement does not constitute a "major change in objective circumstances" under China's Labor Contract Law, the legal threshold normally required to justify redundancy-based termination. The court also found the reassignment offer unreasonable on its own terms. The ruling built on a December 2024 Beijing arbitration decision involving a map data worker dismissed after AI took over his role, reaching the same conclusion: adopting AI is a business choice, not an unforeseen event, and its costs cannot be shifted unilaterally onto employees.

The cases have drawn international legal attention because they cut against the assumption — common in at-will jurisdictions like the United States — that AI-driven restructuring is a straightforward business decision. Finland's framework sits between these poles.

The Finnish legal reality

Finnish employers have considerably more discretion than their Chinese counterparts to restructure around AI.

"In Finland, the employer has the right to decide what business activities are operated and how business and roles within the company are organized," Honkinen says.

Roles can be terminated for financial, production-related, or reorganization reasons linked to technological development, including AI adoption, provided the amount of work has genuinely declined. But that discretion comes with procedural strings attached.

Under Finland's Co-operation Act, employers with at least 50 employees must begin change negotiations if planned measures could materially affect employees' work tasks, working methods, working hours, or lead to layoffs or dismissals on financial or production-related grounds. Employers with 20 to 49 employees face similar obligations in cases involving broader personnel reductions.

Employers must also assess whether employees can be reassigned or retrained before dismissals take place. "The employer has to consider whether the employee can be placed into another role or trained for another role," Honkinen says.

That retraining obligation is narrower than it sounds. Companies do not have to educate employees into entirely new professions — the expectation is shorter-term training into adjacent roles where employees already possess the core capabilities needed.

The timing trap

The harder question for Finnish boards is not whether they can reduce roles, but when AI adoption becomes serious enough to trigger the formal negotiation process.

That is Honkinen's central warning. Companies that drift from AI experimentation into operational deployment without recognizing the transition can find themselves on the wrong side of the procedural line.

"At what point does the company have sufficient information on the estimated impacts on employees?" she says. There is no clean answer in the statute — and the timing matters, because employers cannot make business decisions that directly result in headcount reductions before change negotiations have been completed. 

At the same time, change negotiations cannot be held on a “just in case” basis without a concrete plan and an assessment of workforce impacts. "That is something that needs to be remembered," Honkinen says.

As understanding of AI’s concrete impact on business operations grows, it becomes increasingly likely that we will see more change negotiations carried out already at the stage when new AI investments are being considered, she adds.

The Chinese rulings flagged a structurally similar issue from the opposite direction. Courts there argued that if AI restructuring becomes necessary, employers should first prioritize retraining workers, offer reasonable reassignment terms, and provide support measures before moving to dismissals. Two very different legal systems have landed on overlapping employer obligations.

The idea that Europe is regulating itself out of competitiveness has become a familiar refrain. It surfaces in policy debates and boardrooms alike, often as a simple explanation for why the continent lags behind the United States in technology. But according to Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School, that diagnosis misses the point.

“The debate about digital regulation is a sideshow to the main problems underlying Europe’s technical system.”

Bradford does not dismiss the importance of competitiveness. On the contrary, she frames it as fundamental. “There’s no security without prosperity. Europe needs more economic growth, and technology is key to that.”

But focusing on regulation, she argues, risks distracting from deeper structural constraints that have shaped Europe’s tech ecosystem for years.

A fragmented market at home

The most immediate of these constraints is internal fragmentation. Despite decades of integration, Europe remains far from a seamless market.

“There’s no true digital single market in Europe. We still have a very fragmented marketplace.” For companies, this makes scaling fundamentally different from the United States. Instead of expanding within one large market, European firms must navigate many.

“European tech companies have to scale across 27 different markets, with different languages, consumer preferences, and regulatory fragmentation.”

The cost of this fragmentation is not abstract. “If you translate those internal barriers into tariff equivalents, it’s about 60% for goods and close to 100% for services.”

These are not formal tariffs, but they illustrate how difficult it is to operate across Europe as if it were a single market.

Why scaling remains difficult

Bradford zeroes in on four issues that explain why this competitiveness problem persists: market fragmentation, capital, risk culture, and talent.

She has already pointed to fragmentation as a core constraint. Capital is another. “European companies do well in early funding rounds, but when they need larger amounts of capital, they often turn to US investors or get acquired.”

Risk culture also plays a role. “In Europe, if you fail, you’re often done. It’s very hard to raise money again.”

She contrasts this with the United States. “In the US, failure is part of the model. After bankruptcy, investors may still back you if you’re working on something ambitious.”

Talent flows reinforce the gap. “Europe is losing talent to the US, where the capital, top universities, and concentration of talent are.”

Taken together, these factors describe a system where innovation exists, but scaling remains constrained.

Anu Bradford is the Henry L. Moses professor of law and international organization at Columbia Law School and director of its European Legal Studies Center. Her research focuses on international trade law, EU law, and antitrust.

A world without a dominant model

The global environment is also shifting. The expectation that one model of technology governance will prevail is fading.

“There won’t be a single regulatory model that becomes global.” Bradford explores this dynamic in Digital Empires, where she outlines competing American, Chinese, and European approaches to regulating technology.

In the interview, she notes that each model faces its own pressures. “They’re all having a moment, but also facing headwinds.”

The result is not convergence, but coexistence.

The rise of tech sovereignty

For companies, this fragmentation is already reshaping strategy.

“Tech companies are now expected to offer sovereign solutions, where governments retain control over data and operations.”

Meeting those expectations often requires duplication. “That means replicating infrastructure, like building data centers in different parts of the world.”

Global operations are becoming less uniform and more complex, as firms adapt to political and regulatory demands.