Economists surprised as Finland's output grows 2.8% in May

LapWall Corporation has named Tiina Määttä as Chief Financial Officer and Legal Officer, one day after announcing the departure of CFO Tuomo Riihonen. Määttä joins the management team on 1 October 2026. She takes over finance at the point where the company's full-year guidance depends on a sharper second half and on a factory ramp-up that has already slipped once.

Riihonen's employment ended on 24 September, the day his exit was announced, with CEO Jarmo Pekkarinen covering the CFO duties in the interim. No reason was given. Seven weeks earlier, Riihonen presented the half-year results alongside Pekkarinen. 

The first half delivered growth, but the guidance needs a margin step-up

LapWall's January to June revenue rose 24.0% to EUR 23.3 million, and EBITA grew 80.1% to EUR 2.0 million. The EBITA margin reached 8.6%, against 5.9% a year earlier. Between quarters, however, the margin moved the other way, falling from 9.5% in the first quarter to 7.9% in the second, although both were ahead of the prior year 

The company kept its guidance for 2026 of EUR 49 to 54 million in revenue and EUR 4.8 to 5.8 million in EBITA. 

Order backlog gives visibility, the Pyhännä factory sets the pace

Demand is not the constraint. The order backlog reached EUR 25.4 million at the end of June, the highest in the company's history, and the offer pipeline stood at nearly EUR 60 million. Pekkarinen pointed to data centre construction as a growing segment, including a supply agreement for XTX Markets' data centre project in Kajaani.

Capacity is the variable. The new Pyhännä factory, LapWall's largest investment to date, was about 95% complete on a cost basis at the end of June. In April, the aim was single-shift production across the whole factory during 2026. By August, the target to meet the investment's production goals had moved to the final quarter of the year, with the company noting that ramp-up remained behind its original schedule. Headcount rose from 127 to 143 over the year to June.

Ville Raatikainen, a manufacturing engineering director at iLOQ with an R&D and product management background at Nokia, joins the Management Team on January 1, 2027. He is the second outside hire to the team since July, and he starts in the year the PCB maker commissions its expanded Oulu plant.

Aspocomp has appointed Ville Raatikainen (born 1984), M.Sc. (Eng.), as Chief Engineering and Technology Officer and a member of the Management Team from January 1, 2027. He currently serves as Director, Product Lifecycle and Manufacturing Engineering at iLOQ Oy and previously held R&D and product management roles at Nokia. Chief Technology Officer Mitri Mattila will stay with the company and report to Raatikainen. Mattila has worked at Aspocomp since 1997 and sat on the Management Team since 2018. 

Chief executive Manu Skyttä's endorsement speaks to production as much as to technology:

Ville has a strong track record in managing complex technical environments, improving production performance, and developing high-quality, cost-effective design operations. He has a strong background in both global listed companies like Nokia and fast-growing technology companies like iLOQ, and I am pleased to welcome him to Aspocomp. 

Six of seven Management Team members will have joined since 2024

Raatikainen follows Ilkka Lohi, who became Quality Director on September 2, 2026 in a role the company raised to Management Team level. Listeds data shows how far the renewal runs. Skyttä became chief executive in 2024 after serving as EVP, Operations at Patria, and Pekka Holopainen joined the team as operations chief the same year. Hanna-Leena Keskitalo and Terhi Launis followed in 2025, with Launis taking over finance on September, 2025. When the January 2027 line-up takes effect, Antti Ojala, a member since 2013, will be the only one whose seat predates 2024.

This is a team assembled for the expansion, not inherited from the loss years. The board supplies the sector memory. Chairman Ville Vuori is a former Incap chief executive, and director Anssi Korhonen was CTO of VTI Technologies.

The hire lands as Oulu moves from construction to yield

The Oulu program is worth more than EUR 10 million and aims to lift throughput capacity by up to 50%. Demand had already outrun the plant. At the strategy launch in November 2025, Skyttä said: “The capacity of the Oulu plant has been fully utilized throughout 2025, and demand has already exceeded our capacity.The growth in demand in our largest customer segments appears likely to continue over the next 5–10 years.” The building extension was finished on schedule and within budget, and new capacity is to be commissioned in phases throughout 2027. By July the automated warehouse was running, factory acceptance tests for new production lines had begun, and management said the second half would center on production quality and yield.

The risks are operational. Spare-parts shortages after an equipment manufacturer's bankruptcy slowed deliveries in the first quarter. Delivery times for laminates, fiberglass, resins and copper foil are lengthening and prices are rising, and the company warns that the installations may temporarily disrupt production. Those are manufacturing engineering problems, and that is the experience Raatikainen brings from iLOQ.

A record order book still has to turn into margin

The order book reached a record EUR 25.9 million at the end of June, with parts stretching to late 2027. Semiconductor customers placed 38% of second-quarter orders and defense customers 25%, while the five largest customers' share of net sales fell to 58% (75%). Profit has lagged, weighed down until the second quarter by low-margin orders agreed in 2024. Skyttä's position is unambiguous: “We expect profitability to improve in the second half of the year.”