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Bioretec has appointed Panu Mikkonen as chief financial officer from 6 October 2026, the fourth person to be named to the role since September 2025.
The appointment itself is quite routine. What stands out is the pattern around it: of roughly 400 management-team changes at Finnish listed companies that Listeds has tracked so far in 2026, Bioretec's finance function stands out for cycling through four CFOs (two of them interim) in just over a year, a pace uncommon for the role.
How the CFO role changed hands
Anne-Mari Matikainen took over as interim CFO with immediate effect on September 15, 2025, while outgoing CFO Johanna Salko stayed on to support the transition until her departure on November 30, 2025. Tuukka Paavola became permanent CFO on January 20, 2026, but Bioretec disclosed his departure barely six months later, on July 2, 2026. Anna-Mari Venola stepped in as interim CFO the same week to bridge to Mikkonen. Mikkonen is the fourth person to hold or be named CFO in roughly 13 months.
Frequent leadership changes cut two ways. Rapid turnover carries a cost of its own, in lost continuity and institutional memory, but replacing a poor fit quickly can equally signal decisiveness.
Two of the four moves were interim appointments, the usual way a company covers a gap while it searches, not four permanent hires that failed. Interim finance chiefs are in many cases also confirmed in the job later, though at Bioretec neither was made permanent.
All four CFO changes have unfolded under a single chief executive, Sarah van Hellenberg Hubar-Fisher, who became CEO after serving an interim position since May 2025, only in August 2025, weeks before the first of them; new chief executives often rebuild the finance function around themselves, and some of the turnover may reflect that. Bioretec has not disclosed the reasons behind each departure.
The backdrop he inherits
The finance turnover has run alongside an unsettled operating period. On October 31, 2025, Bioretec restated its first-half 2025 net sales, said it no longer expected accelerated growth, and withdrew its financial targets. Net sales then fell 12.6% to EUR 1.2 million in the first quarter of 2026. The company ran two rounds of change negotiations inside a year: one opened November 12, 2025 , a second in production concluded June 17, 2026 with three terminations.
Governance was reset in parallel: the May 8, 2026 Annual General Meeting re-elected five directors and added David Gill, resolved no dividend on a 2025 loss of EUR 7.87 million, and elected Kustaa Poutiainen as the Chairperson. The market registered the disruption: Bioretec's shares closed at EUR 0.083 on October 28, 2025, down from EUR 0.129 before the restatement three sessions earlier, on volume many times the daily average.
Mikkonen's mandate
On paper, Mikkonen fits the brief. He arrives with nearly 30 years across finance, business controlling, corporate development and strategic leadership, most recently as CFO of BPW Kraatz Group, where he ran finance and IT across Finland and the Baltics and worked as a strategic partner to management and the board. Earlier, he has held senior roles at Atoy Group and Nordcloud Group, and a master's in accounting from the Helsinki School of Economics, round out a career weighted toward cross-border finance operations and organisational change.
He reports to CEO Sarah van Hellenberg Hubar-Fisher and joins the management team. He succeeds Anna-Mari Venola, Bioretec's Controller, who has held the role on an interim basis since early July 2026.
Bioretec frames the hire around "international finance leadership, business transformation, and value creation"; that stress on transformation over steady-state stewardship reads as a signal of the kind of finance chief the company thinks it needs now.
Bioretec's target, set in December 2025, is to exceed EUR 10 million in net sales by 2028. The clearest positive in the period is regulatory: the RemeOs DrillPin received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in December 2025 , building on RemeOs's first U.S. market authorization in March 2023 and its comprehensive CE mark in Europe in January 2025.
Mikkonen's brief, in the CEO's words, is to help "execute our growth strategy and expand globally". The nearer-term test is narrower: carrying a finance team through a full fiscal year without another departure. Whether he breaks that pattern will be the clearest early sign that Bioretec has steadied its finance function.
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