The digital and legal appointments announced on 18 August complete a set. People, finance, digital and legal, four of nine Executive Board functions, have a new holder named in 2026. The chief executive, operating, revenue, customer and communications seats have not moved. The rebuild is running from the strongest quarter Finnair has reported, and from a general meeting that rejected the company's pay report with 90 percent of the votes represented against it.

Finnair appointed Arti Zeighami, 55, as Chief Digital Officer from 19 August 2026, and Kaarina Ståhlberg, 59, as Senior Vice President and General Counsel from 31 August 2026. Both join the Executive Board and report to CEO Turkka Kuusisto. Zeighami succeeds Antti Kleemola, who supports the handover until the end of September. Ståhlberg succeeds Sami Sarelius, who continues as an executive advisor to Finnair until the end of the year.

The two profiles do not overlap, and neither comes from aviation. Zeighami was most recently Partner and Director at Boston Consulting Group working on the scaling of artificial intelligence, and before that Chief Data and Analytics Officer at H&M Group.

Ståhlberg holds a Master of Laws, was Assistant General Counsel at Nokia and General Counsel at both Posti Group and Fortum, and sits on the boards of Finnish listed companies like Aspo, Finnair, Fiskars group, Vincit.

Four of nine functions changed. None of them touch daily commercial execution.

Finnair discloses a nine-member Executive Board covering products and customers, revenue, operations, digital services, finance and strategy, people and culture, communications, and legal affairs. Four of those have a new holder named this year.

Two of the four are already in the job. Sini Kivekäs became Chief People Officer and joined the Executive Board on 2 June, the day Kaisa Aalto-Luoto left it, four months after Finnair disclosed the departure on 19 January.

Ståhlberg starts in legal on 31 August. Finance follows on 1 November, when Jussi Siitonen becomes Chief Financial Officer in place of Pia Aaltonen-Forsell, who is leaving for the same role at Valmet.

The finance change carried a governance step. Siitonen was re-elected to the Board of Directors on 24 March and resigned from it on 24 July, the day his appointment was announced. Crossing from a non-executive seat to an executive one requires exactly that, and the board consequently runs with seven of the eight directors elected in March until the next general meeting.

The rebuild is being done from a record quarter, not a bad one

Second-quarter revenue was EUR 916.7 million, up 16.4 percent from EUR 787.7 million. The comparable operating result was EUR 78.4 million against EUR 10.3 million a year earlier, and passenger numbers rose 7.6 percent to 3.314 million.

Across the half year, revenue reached EUR 1,694.8 million from EUR 1,481.9 million, and the comparable operating result turned to EUR 77.8 million from a loss of EUR 52.3 million. The first quarter had already improved, with revenue up 12.1 percent to EUR 778.1 million and a comparable operating result of EUR -0.6 million.

Finnair raised its 2026 outlook on 22 July to revenue of EUR 3.4 to 3.5 billion and a comparable operating result of EUR 120 to 190 million, assuming no material disruption to fuel availability. Kuusisto called the quarterly figure "a record-high 78.4 million euros", which is the company's characterisation of its own result. July passenger volume rose 9.3 percent year on year.

Enabling functions are often rebuilt after a shock. These are being rebuilt while the numbers improve.

In the first half of 2026, BlackRock's ownership grew in eight of the ten Finnish listed companies where its position is visible. Two of those increases were announced. The other six were not, because Finnish law only asks for an announcement when a holding crosses a reporting threshold. The lowest is 5 per cent, and none of these crossed it.

Ownership gained between the end of December 2025 and the end of June 2026, in basis points, with the number of BlackRock announcements each company published alongside. Register figures are drawn from Listeds executive intelligence.

* For Metso, Orion and Stora Enso the readings are the holdings reported at the crossings closest to each end of the window: Metso 12 February and 30 June, Orion 5 January and 17 June, Stora Enso beginning of January and 26 June. Nordea's second reading is end-July 2026; all other companies are 31 December 2025 to 30 June 2026. Nordea discloses its major shareholders rounded to the nearest 0.1 million shares (e.g. 194.6 million shares), so the share counts and changes shown for Nordea are approximations.

Basis points of ownership are used here because they survive the two things that distort share counts, dilution and buybacks, and because they mean the same thing to a chair and to a portfolio manager. One caution before reading the table: the three companies with announcements are measured as combined holdings, shares plus financial instruments, as filed. The seven others are measured as shares registered in BlackRock's own name.

Four of the five biggest increases, ranks two through five, produced no announcement at all, and 77 basis points of ownership changed hands across those four companies in silence.The 47 announcements cluster at the two ends of the table, at rank one and rank nine.

Metso gained 42 basis points without changing the percentage of shares held

Metso's share holding reads 4.98 per cent on 12 February and 4.98 per cent on 30 June. Identical to the second decimal across four and a half months, on a net movement of 39,519 shares. Over the same period the holding through financial instruments went from 0.09 to 0.52 per cent, taking the combined position from 5.08 to 5.50 per cent.

That is the largest increase in exposure to any Finnish listed company in this dataset, and a share register would not show it. Metso published eight announcements while it happened, each one describing a line being crossed rather than a position being built.

Stora Enso published twenty times and ended the half exactly where it started

At the beginning of January the Stora Enso holding read 4.26 per cent in shares and 0.73 per cent through financial instruments, 5.00 per cent in total. On 26 June: 3.81 per cent in shares, 1.19 per cent through financial instruments. Total, 5.00 per cent. The shares fell forty-five basis points, the financial instruments rose forty-six, and twenty announcements describe the round trip.

Orion is the only one of the three where the share holding itself crossed the line, from 4.97 per cent on 5 January to 5.01 per cent on 17 June, with financial instruments marginal throughout at 0.02 to 0.09 per cent. Nineteen announcements, eleven basis points.

Ovaro's board has costed its IFRS reporting at €300,000 a year and asked shareholders to move down to First North, with the share still publicly traded. Days earlier, Innofactor's Sami Ensio put his own exit price at €700,000.

On 18 August, the board of Ovaro Kiinteistösijoitus Oyj proposed that shareholders move the company from Nasdaq Helsinki's regulated main market to First North Growth Market Finland, while it remains publicly traded. An extraordinary general meeting decides on 8 September. The same morning, Ovaro withdrew its 2026 guidance.

The saving is a fifth of last year's profit

The move lets Ovaro drop IFRS, mandatory on the main market, for Finnish FAS, which First North permits.

The board puts the savings at approximately €300,000 a year. CEO Marko Huttunen told Keskisuomalainen that is about 14% of the company's administrative costs.

Set that against the company. Ovaro's 2025 revenue was €4.288m, down from €5.262m in 2024, on a net result of €1.468m. The saving is roughly a fifth of last year's profit, at a company with four employees and an €80.4m balance sheet at 31 March 2026.

Innofactor's founder priced the same listing at €700,000, then left entirely

Three days before Ovaro's announcement, Talouselämä reported Sami Ensio, founder and chief executive of the software company Innofactor, estimating that operating as a listed company meant roughly €700,000 a year in additional costs, and naming regulation as a central reason for leaving the exchange. Innofactor left by the other door: Onni Bidco's tender offer took it private, the company applied for delisting on 31 March 2025, and the shares were listed for the last time on Nasdaq Helsinki on 25 April 2025.

The two figures are not like-for-like. Ensio's €700,000 is a chief executive's estimate of the full cost of being listed; Ovaro's €300,000 is a board's estimate of one line item, the switch from IFRS to FAS reporting.

Finland's boards are replacing chief executives briskly, just not at the top of the market, and not with women. The two blanks say more than the twelve appointments do.

In a market as small and closely watched as Finland's, the interest in a quarterly count of chief executives usually lies in the names. This quarter it lies in the gaps. The Listeds CEO Index — Finland for the second quarter of 2026, produced in partnership with SAM Headhunting, records twelve new listed-company chief executives and, around them, a single number that keeps recurring. It is zero. None of the twelve is a woman. And none of the country's largest companies changed its leader at all. It is a second quarter running with the top of the market completely still, a year after more than a third of those same companies replaced their CEO.

The renewal is real, just not at the top

That stillness is not a market slowing down. Below the largest companies, renewal is running at pace. Twenty-five new chief executives took up their roles across Finnish listed companies in the first half of 2026, a rate of about 50 a year against the 43 recorded across all of 2025, and it sits on top of a market that has already renewed roughly a third of its CEOs within eighteen months.

Every one of the twelve second-quarter changes happened below Large Cap: seven in Small Cap, four on First North, one in Mid Cap. The churn is real. It has simply stopped reaching the top.

For a board, that combination is the point. "Many boards have already done the groundwork on a new direction and new focus areas, and where the sitting CEO cannot take the company there, they act," says Leena Hellfors, Managing Director of SAM Headhunting. "Succession has become a continuous capability, not an occasional project." 

“Many boards have already done the groundwork on a new direction and new focus areas, and where the sitting CEO cannot take the company there, they act. Succession has become a continuous capability, not an occasional project.”

Across most of the market, that capability is visibly in use. At the very top, it is switched off.

Why the top sits still

The freeze reflects a specific instinct about the largest jobs, and the rest of the quarter shows the same instinct at work in who gets hired. The twelve new CEOs took up their roles at an average age of about 54, roughly four years older than the age at which the sitting population first became chief executives. Half were promoted from inside, and only two of the twelve came from outside Finland. Where boards did move, they reached for the experienced, the internal, the known.

"Leading a listed company is a genuinely different job, and boards look for proven experience and judgement," Hellfors notes. "There is a deep pool of capable, more senior leaders at the moment, so an experienced profile is often the natural choice." The index bears out the gradient: the largest companies appoint their CEOs oldest, and in practice do not hand the seat to a first-time or younger leader, which is understandable.

No women in Q2, but two are starting in Q3

The number that drew the most attention is the one that reads as a step back. Not one of the twelve new CEOs was a woman, against a sitting-population share of just 8.1%, and across the half-year only one of twenty-five appointments went to a woman. A market that consistently buys proven experience over runway narrows its pipeline of younger leaders, and does the same to an already thin pipeline of women.

The picture is not static, though. Because the index tracks the date a CEO starts, the turn is already visible. Two women are recorded as taking up CEO roles in the third quarter, both showing in the data before the quarter has even closed.

When the top does move, it moves as a team

There is a second reason the frozen tier matters: a CEO change is rarely a single change. 

Across the twelve companies that did change leader in Q2, management teams saw four arrivals and ten departures in the weeks that followed, concentrated in a few companies rather than spread evenly, but consistent in direction. 

“A CEO change is rarely a single appointment. The board has usually set the direction already, and the new CEO arrives to execute it, which is what pulls a wider management-team rebuild behind it. Increasingly the assignment is a whole core team rather than one person.”

Which means the stillness at the top is storing up scale. When one of Finland's largest companies does finally change its CEO, and eventually one will, the board, its investors and its management team should expect not a single appointment but a leadership-team change playing out over the following quarters.

Read the index here

Boards were quieter than at any point since the spring meetings. The month's only board departure happened because a director took a finance job.

According to Listeds data, Nordic listed companies recorded 30 board and management changes in July, down from 69 in June. Boards accounted for 2 — one appointment and one departure, against 18 recorded in June. Management teams recorded 28: 8 appointments, 16 departures, four role changes, nearly half of June's 51.

The drop is seasonal. What sits underneath it is not.

On 24 July, Finnair announced that Pia Aaltonen-Forsell was leaving as finance chief and that Jussi Siitonen would take the role from 1 November. On the same day, Valmet named Aaltonen-Forsell as its own next CFO, starting at the latest at the end of January 2027.One move, disclosed from both ends, three minutes apart.

Follow it in both directions and five Helsinki-listed companies sit on the same line.

Fiskars Group disclosed on 24 June that Siitonen, its CFO and deputy to the chief executive, would leave after August. Niko Haavisto, previously CFO at Nokian Tyres and CapMan, took the Fiskars finance role on 10 August. Siitonen went to Finnair on 1 November, and resigned from Finnair's board on 24 July to take it. Aaltonen-Forsell goes to Valmet, replacing Katri Hokkanen, who leaves at the end of September after nearly four years in the role and close to twenty years at the company. Hokkanen goes to Kalmar on 1 October, replacing Sakari Ahdekivi, who steps down on 30 September and stays in a transition role to 31 December. Ahdekivi is now among the proposed board members of WISA Group, the plywood business UPM is demerging.

Election to the WISA Group board is conditional on UPM's extraordinary general meeting of 31 August 2026 and completion of the demerger is expected on or about 31 October 2026.
Sources: company stock exchange releases, 24 June - 7 August 2026

Five companies. Four finance vacancies, each filled from another listed company — and the chain ends at a board seat.

“There is no shortage of Finnish finance chiefs. There is just a short list, and every board most likely knows who is on it.”

The disclosure sequence is worth noting on its own. Fiskars named Siitonen's exit on 24 June; Finnair named his destination on 24 July. A departing company discloses the vacancy roughly a month before the hiring company discloses the hire. Under the Nasdaq Helsinki inside-information regime that is the system working as intended, and it means the market reads a single move in two instalments — usually without knowing, at the first instalment, which company is at the other end. August and completion of the demerger is

Kimmo Kärkkäinen will take over as Digia's CFO by February 2027 at the latest, arriving from Vincit's finance seat. It is the second time since 2017 that Digia has filled its CFO role with a sitting CFO from another Nasdaq Helsinki company, a pattern Listeds examines across the wider market in a companion piece.

Digia has appointed Kimmo Kärkkäinen (b. 1972) as Chief Financial Officer and a member of the management team, effective by February 2027 at the latest, reporting to President and CEO Timo Levoranta. Kärkkäinen joins from Vincit, where he is currently CFO, and has previously held CFO roles at Fira Group and leadership positions at Sitedrive Oy, private-equity firm Bocap, Affecto Plc, and TeliaSonera.

He succeeds Kristiina Simola, who announced on 21 April 2026 that she would step down to pursue a board career after serving as Digia's CFO since 2017. Simola remains in post through the transition, with an outside date of end-October 2026.

Vincit has confirmed Kärkkäinen's resignation "to join another company," with him continuing in role during a transition period until the beginning of November 2026 at the latest while it recruits a successor. CEO Julius Manni thanked him for developing the company's processes and leadership culture.

On the appointment, Kärkkäinen said: "Digia has made an impressive journey as a profitable growth company, and it has a strong position in the Finnish software and services market. I am excited to join Digia in building its next phase. As Chief Financial Officer, I want to support the implementation of the strategy and the growth of shareholder value together with a skilled team.”

Levoranta cited Kärkkäinen’s “strong experience in financial management and business development,” as well as his experience in mergers and acquisitions and in building growth companies and new businesses.

Between December 2025 and August 2026, at least ten CFOs changed seats across Nasdaq Helsinki and First North. Read as a set, one feature stands out: every incoming CFO already held the title at another listed company. None was an internal promotion. None was a first-time CFO.

On 5 August 2026, Digia named Kimmo Kärkkäinen its next CFO, recruited from Vincit, itself a listed IT company. We got curious: is it normal for a Finnish listed company to hire its CFO from within the industry, straight out of another public company's finance seat? So we checked our own data, and got the answer.

On its own, the Digia appointment is a routine leadership-moves story, the kind Listeds covers dozens of times a year. But set it beside every other CFO move Listeds has tracked over the past months, and a pattern appears that no single release shows on its own.

Ten CFO hires, and not one was promoted from within

Across the ten moves in the table below, not one incoming CFO was promoted from within their new company, and not one was taking a CFO title for the first time. Every appointee arrived already holding the CFO role at another listed company.

That is the story worth telling. It is a stronger, more defensible claim than the "domino chains" it is tempting to draw from the same data, because, as set out below, chains are partly an artefact of how you connect the dots, whereas the absence of internal promotions is a genuine, countable pattern.

Ten CFOs changed companies between December 2025 and August 2026

This is not a sample. It is every CFO change Listeds tracked across Nasdaq Helsinki and First North in the window, verified against primary company releases.

Two dating notes, in the interest of precision: Minni Lempinen was acting CFO at Endomines before KH Group; and Tuomas Mäkipeska's move to Kemira was announced in October 2025 and took effect on 1 April 2026. The window is therefore best described as December 2025 to August 2026, not "the first seven months of 2026"; three of the ten were announced in 2025.

The "domino chains" oversell it; the real pattern is what's missing

It is tempting to connect these into cascades, because several of the seats link up. But a note of analytical caution belongs here: every CFO departure creates a vacancy that someone fills, so almost any set of same-role moves can be drawn as a "chain." Tracing a seat backwards through its last three occupants does not prove the moves caused one another. It mostly proves that finance-chief roles, once vacated, get filled.

So the chains below are offered as illustration, not as a discovered structure. They show how tightly the same small pool recirculates, but the load-bearing finding remains the one above: no internal promotions, no first-timers.

Chain 1: Industrial & transport circuit

Niko Haavisto left Nokian Tyres for Fiskars Group; Jussi Siitonen left Fiskars for Finnair; Pia Aaltonen-Forsell left Finnair for Valmet; Katri Hokkanen left Valmet for Kalmar. Each departure vacated the seat the next executive filled. The Finnair-to-Valmet link was confirmed in the companies' own releases; the Valmet-to-Kalmar and Fiskars-to-Finnair links likewise.

Chain 2: Energy & healthtech circuit

Jukka Kainulainen moved from Kempower to Revenio Group; Robin Pulkkinen then moved from Revenio Group to F-Secure.

Chain 3: the Digia hub

Kristiina Simola arrived at Digia from Digitalist Group in 2017; Kimmo Kärkkäinen arrives from Vincit in 2026. Two different companies, feeding the same seat, nine years apart.

For three years, the reinvention of the marketing chief into a growth owner has been reshaping the C-suite of America's Fortune 500. Finland's listed-company management teams never carried many CMOs to begin with, yet the same shift is now surfacing on Nasdaq Helsinki, and it arrives as a question for boards and CEOs, not for marketing.

On 15 September 2025, the Chief Marketing and Sustainability Officer role at Rebl Group ended. Among the Chief titles the small-cap group kept was a different one: Chief Growth Officer. Taken alone, it is a single management change at one listed company. Taken against the wider record, it is one of the clearest Finnish instances yet of a shift documented at scale in the United States.
On 7 July 2026, Forrester published its third annual analysis of marketing leadership in the Fortune 500. Marketing executives who sit on the top team or report to the CEO are now found at 52% of F500 companies, down from 58% a year earlier.

The "chief marketing officer" title itself is used by just 36%, down from 49% in a single year. Forrester's Ian Bruce argues the decline reading misses the point: the role is not disappearing, it is being reinvented into chief growth officer, chief commercial officer and chief customer officer, giving one leader accountability for growth across the whole customer lifecycle.

Finland barely had CMOs to lose on the management teams

The temptation is to read this as an American story. Across the 188 companies actively listed on Nasdaq Helsinki and First North, seven have a standalone Chief Marketing Officer (not seven percent, seven companies), and not one of them is a large cap. All 33 Finnish large caps have zero. Where Forrester is tracking the CMO's decline at the top of the US market, the top of the Finnish market had already finished that decline before the story began.

But the absence of the CMO title is the wrong thing to fix on. The part of the American trend that matters is not the marketing chief leaving; it is where the growth mandate goes next, and who at the top table is made to own the number. On that question, the change is visible in Finland too.

Rebl kept a growth title where a marketing one used to sit. Raute appointed Arto Kaikkola as Chief Commercial Officer effective 5 May 2026, a seat that folds sales, marketing, communications and commercial excellence into a single owner. And the inflow follows the same shape, though not the same title. Of nine senior marketing hires across Finnish listed companies in 2025 and 2026, only one — Framery's acting CMO — holds a marketing-only Chief title. Two more reached Chief level with marketing bundled into something else: sustainability at Gofore, commercial duties at Raute. The remaining six arrived below Chief level entirely, as EVPs, SVPs, VPs or a Director. The new senior marketing hire in Finland rarely gets a Chief title of any kind, let alone a marketing-only one.

Where the CMO title does survive, it clusters among recent arrivals. Companies that listed in 2021 or later carry a standalone CMO at four times the rate of those listed earlier (9% against 2%), and hold any Chief-level marketing seat at more than triple the rate (16% against 5%). But this is not evidence that going public designs the role in: in three of the five recent-listing CMOs the title predates the IPO, so the pattern is really the marketing title fading among long-listed incumbents, not newer companies inventing it. For boards, that is the point. The growth-ownership question is sharpest exactly where most of the market sits, at the long-established companies that have already let the marketing title go.

Raisio spent 2025 preparing to grow: it sold off a loss-making plant-protein unit, set hard 2027 targets and built a standing M&A function. Then it handed the company to Elli Siltala, a food-industry veteran of around 25 years at Valio, who has said her first priority is to listen and learn before setting a direction. The plan is already built. The open question is how Raisio's new chief executive chooses to take it forward.

Raisio is a Finnish brand house. It’s worth sits in names: Benecol, brand sold on cholesterol lowering products, and Elovena, the oats brand, both marketed well beyond Finland, alongside home-market staples such as Sunnuntai baking goods, Torino pasta and Nalle cereals.

Growing a brand house means one of two things: build the brands harder, or buy new ones. Raisio's board has said, in writing, that it intends to do both, and it has spent the past eighteen months building the capacity to do the buying.

On Wednesday, 12 August 2026, the company publishes its half-year report. Elli Siltala, appointed CEO on 7 August, does not start until 1 September; until then the outgoing Pasi Flinkman holds the seat.

The board chose the tool. The CEO chose to listen

Chairman Arto Tiitinen said in the appointment release that "under Elli Siltala's leadership our ambition is to grow the company through both organic growth and acquisitions." Read against the run of Nordic CEO-change releases, that is a pointed line. Boards usually credential the incoming chief executive and gesture at a "next phase." Tiitinen named the instrument, acquisitions, and set the direction before Siltala set foot in the building.

Siltala's own words went the other way. After the standard opening, she closed on this: "My first priority will be to listen, learn and build a shared understanding of how we can create long-term value for our shareholders, customers and employees."

Across the incoming-CEO releases on Listeds Executive Intelligence database, that is unusual. Most new chief executives arrive with at least a directional theme on day one: a capability to strengthen, a strategy to keep executing, a model to scale. Siltala, in this set, is the only one to make listening itself the priority and to leave the agenda more open.

Finnish healthcare group Mehiläinen has acquired the occupational health services of Heltti Oy in a business transaction taking effect on 1 September 2026. The deal strengthens Mehiläinen’s position as one of Finland’s leading providers of occupational health services.

Around 60 of Heltti’s occupational health professionals will transfer to Mehiläinen as existing employees. Founded in 2013, Heltti has built a reputation for customized, fixed-price occupational health services for companies whose employees perform intellectual work. It currently serves more than 800 small and medium-sized companies across Finland, with its occupational health services used by approximately 9,000 employees.

The two companies have worked together since 2020, when Mehiläinen became Heltti’s partner clinic. “It is truly wonderful to take the next step together and welcome you to the Mehiläinen team,” said Antti Miettinen, Business Director of Working Life Services at Mehiläinen, adding that Heltti’s expertise, values and services complement Mehiläinen’s offering.

Heltti clients will gain access to Mehiläinen’s broad range of services and network, including its Digital Clinic and YritysMehiläinen corporate service, which provides real-time visibility into occupational health service usage and sick-leave monitoring.

Finland's machinery and metal products sector added jobs and orders in the second quarter of 2026, according to new data from Technology Industries of Finland.

Employment in the sector reached its highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, while orders across the wider technology industry grew 13% from the first quarter and 19% from a year earlier.

Machinery and metal products employed 138,200 people at the end of June 2026, the most since the financial crisis and 2,500 more than the lowest point of the last downturn. Order backlogs across the technology industry rose 8% between March and June, and a key demand indicator hit +20, its highest since late 2021. The technology industry's 2025 revenue came in at EUR 104 billion, up 2.8% from 2024.

Orders up 13 percent, backlogs up 8 percent

Jobs across the whole technology industry dipped slightly this quarter. That drop came from services, like IT and consulting, not from manufacturing.