On July 24, Nokia’s board chair Timo Ihamuotila bought 60,000 Nokia shares at a volume-weighted €8.45 — about €507,000 of his own money, disclosed three days later under the EU Market Abuse Regulation. He was buying into a slide that took the Helsinki-listed share from a €14.805 close on June 3 to €7.556 on July 29, a fall of about 49%. The stock still trades well above the roughly €3.4 it changed hands at a year ago, before Nokia's USD 1 billion NVIDIA AI-RAN partnership in October 2025 set off a run that carried it more than fourfold into June.
Not every insider "purchase" is a market call. Nokia's April 9 AGM set 2026 board fees at €440,000 for the Chair, €210,000 for the Vice Chair and €185,000 for each other member, and resolved that "approximately 40% of the annual fee will be paid in Nokia shares" — shares the directors must hold for their first three years, so the near-identical share receipts booked for non-executives on May 4, and executives' incentive allocations (Jan 14, May 4, July 9), are compensation. Strip those out, and what's left are the voluntary, open-market trades.
On their own account, the flow tilts to buying.
Ihamuotila had already bought €537,400 on Jan 30 (close €5.42) and €454,805 on Apr 28 (close €9.41). His July 24 purchase was followed by CTO and AI Officer Pallavi Mahajan (around €520,426) and technology standards chief Patrik Hammarén (€365,480), Chief People Officer Kristen Pressner (€519,993) and Chief Geopolitical & Government Relations Officer Mikko Hautala (€55,689) — the last two buying at €7.84 on July 29, days after the Q2 report. Mid-rally, CEO Justin Hotard added €772,102 (Apr 28) - though under Nokia's co-investment long-term incentive arrangement, so not a purely discretionary open-market buy. Nearer the peak, in late May with the shares around €13, Konstanty Owczarek bought around €430,885 and €514,099 (May 22 and 26), and Victoria Hanrahan around €622,595. The only own-account sellers were ahead of the run: Raghav Sahgal (>€1m, Mar 10) and board member Thomas Dannenfeldt (€234,312, Mar 19). Read together, discretionary insiders have on balance been adding — the chair most visibly, on the way down.
The Nordic counterweight.
As leadership bought, Finland's largest institutions sold — though large funds routinely rebalance and take profits after a run this steep, so their selling isn't necessarily a call on the stock. Fidelity's FMR LLC let its voting rights slip below 5% (to 4.92%, disclosed June 30) just before the July 23 results — a threshold flag on voting rights, not a stock dump: its actual shareholding stayed just above 5% (5.20%). Among registered owners, the big pension funds cut hard between March 31 and June 30, while state holder Solidium held firm.
Registered owner | March 31 | June 30 | Change |
Solidium Oy (state, #1) | 325.0m | 325.0m | 0.0m |
Varma | 91.3m | 61.0m | −30.3m |
Ilmarinen | 75.0m | 49.4m | −25.6m |
Elo | 29.9m | 20.1m | −9.8m |
State Pension Fund (VER) | 20.0m | 11.0m | −9.0m |
The quarter wasn't the problem for Nokia; the outlook was.
Q2 on July 23 showed 9% constant-currency net-sales growth, comparable operating profit up 18% to €434 million, AI & Cloud revenue more than doubling, and a record €2.8 billion of AI & Cloud orders. What unsettled the market was guidance: CEO Hotard flagged memory as the "most significant" supply constraint, Nokia lifted 2026 restructuring charges to about €800 million, and guided Q3 profit broadly flat before a Q4 pickup — echoing Ericsson, down about 12% on July 14 on the same memory-cost warning, per press reports. Investors sold the outlook, not the quarter.
One holder is still comfortably ahead: NVIDIA subscribed for its 2.9% stake at USD 6.01 (EUR 5.16) in the October 2025 issuance — below today's ~€7.6, even after the 49% drop.
Derived figures (all calculated by Listeds from primary MAR disclosures, not quoted as headline numbers): every transaction total shown is computed as volume × volume-weighted average price from the underlying release, and figures are presented in euros. Where a transaction was disclosed in US dollars, the euro amount was converted at the transaction-date exchange rate and is therefore derived. Share-price moves: 49% fall = (€14.805 − €7.556) ÷ €14.805; +122% over twelve months = €7.556 ÷ ~€3.4; >4× run = €14.805 ÷ ~€3.4. Pension-fund changes are March 31 vs June 30 register counts, shown in millions rounded to one decimal place.
