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The share has given back nearly half its June rally. Once the automatic fee-shares are removed, the insiders still trading on their own account lean one way, and it's the opposite way from the country's biggest pension funds.
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 into the decline — 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 June 16 and July 29, while state holder Solidium held firm.
Registered owner | Jun 16 | Jul 29 | 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 Jun 16 vs Jul 29 register counts, shown in millions rounded to one decimal place.
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