Panu Porkka was named CEO of the Year at the Nordic Listed Leaders Gala. He talks about the people he leans on, what he looks for in a leader, and why he thinks Finland could use a little more Swedishness.
When Panu Porkka stepped up to accept CEO of the Year 2025 at the Nordic Listed Leaders Gala, he didn’t talk much about himself; instead, he talked about his wife and his team. It was a telling choice for a man who runs one of the most closely watched retailer companies on the Nasdaq Helsinki, and a useful place to start, because the way Porkka leads has a lot to do with the people he chooses to lean on.
"I would not be sane without my wife," he says. Across the phases of a demanding career, she has, in his telling, made his personal and professional growth possible. The work of a listed-company chief executive is, by his own account, sometimes very lonely.
What carries him through the dark stretches is having someone who reminds him he has done his best. With two children, aged five and seven, the ambition at home is shared too: to be as good a father as the hours allow. It is, he says, team play on both sides, and most of it sits in a place that never shows up in the work or on the newspaper pages.
A team that carries the weight
Ask what makes the job rewarding, and the answer is one word: team. Porkka describes a management group he rates as genuinely professional, working to a clear shared agenda and, crucially, carrying responsibility together rather than waiting to be told.
The phrase he keeps returning to is shared ownership. The overlap between people, the way one steps in where another leaves off, would not function, he says, without it.
Like-minded people, excited about the same thing, supporting each other and taking the weight: that is what turns a lonely job into a workable one.
It is also the lens through which he reads talent. Asked what he looks for, Porkka does not hesitate. Attitude is, by a distance, the most important quality: the drive to take hold of a problem and solve it, the instinct to say "I will handle that," the ability to get things done and bring people along.
Curiosity is the second component, a genuine appetite to learn, to stay open, to ask the other person to tell you more, and to want to understand not just what they think but why. Over 25 years, he has come to trust those two signals above almost anything on a CV.
The German lesson
Much of how Porkka works was shaped in Germany. Porkka spent around eight years with Lidl, much of it in Finland and later in Germany, where he steered international sales for Northern Europe and later ran Swiss operations as chief operating officer, including a market opening there.
Germany was never foreign to him: he attended the German School of Helsinki, the language and culture are familiar, and the country is something of a second home.
The management culture left a mark. German business, as he describes it, is matter-of-fact, with the substance of the task firmly in the foreground. It prizes anticipation and planning, treats chance as something to be designed out, and rewards working out what you are trying to achieve before you set off to measure it.
After Lidl, Porkka spent four years at Tokmanni, after which he made a move into specialty retail as chief executive of the Finnish bookshop chain Suomalainen Kirjakauppa.
No hundred-day plan
Porkka did not arrive at Verkkokauppa.com with a 100-day checklist. He joined the board in April 2017 and became CEO in March 2018, succeeding founder Samuli Seppälä, who had led the company for 26 years and built it from a basement startup into one of Finland's most recognizable retail brands before moving to the board.
There was no formal brief beyond the obvious one: growth had begun to slow, and the company needed to find its next chapter.
What Porkka inherited was a business shaped by an entrepreneurial culture that had been one of its greatest strengths. Seppälä's willingness to challenge convention, move quickly, and back bold ideas had helped create a company that stood apart from its competitors. Much of the spirit that defined Verkkokauppa.com, from its relentless focus on customers to its appetite for unconventional bets, was a direct product of its founder.
The challenge was that success had also created a company that still operated much like a fast-growing startup. Many decisions, processes, and ways of working reflected years of founder-led growth. Porkka's task was not to replace that culture but to preserve its strengths while building an organization that could scale beyond any one individual.
That meant developing a stronger management structure, broadening ownership across the leadership team, documenting processes, and introducing systems that made performance more transparent for investors and analysts.
It was as much a cultural transition as an operational one: moving from a founder-led organization to a more distributed model of leadership without losing the ambition and boldness that had made the company successful in the first place.
The one-hour bet
Much of that investment went into building a logistics platform designed for fast, cost-efficient delivery. After an extensive review in 2018 and 2019, the company selected Swisslog's AutoStore system and rolled it out at scale, including what Porkka describes as the world's only installation of its kind built into a multi-storey building.
The automation did not stop at storage. Packing processes were automated, internal goods flows were redesigned, and the company moved beyond a model that had once relied solely on Posti. Together, the changes laid the foundation for some of Verkkokauppa.com's most ambitious customer-facing innovations.
However, the boldest bet was the one-hour delivery. The doubters had a clear story, he recalls. Finns want to drive to the shop, see the fridge before they buy it, and talk to a salesperson. Nobody truly needs same-day delivery, let alone same-hour.
Porkka and his team bet the opposite. Make it easy enough that the gift for tonight's birthday party arrives within the hour, and you have created real value. He saw it as the next disruption, and the company went after it with what he calls a startup mentality and a strong collective belief.
A dose of Swedishness
That belief is, if anything, stronger today. Porkka frames the present as his most accomplished stretch, a company competing hard in a tight market, with thin category margins, and still finding room to invest and rewrite how retail is done in Finland.
He closes on a national note that doubles as a leadership one. Finland's economy, he thinks, is showing signs of life, and the country could use a dose of Swedishness: more optimism, more willingness to celebrate when a company succeeds rather than defaulting to scepticism and asking why someone failed.
The point is not that Finland lacks ambition. Rather, he believes that a culture that openly welcomes success makes it easier for companies to think bigger, attract investment, and pursue growth.
After all, companies rarely grow beyond the limits of what they believe they can become.
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5 min read
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Panu Porkka was named CEO of the Year at the Nordic Listed Leaders Gala. He talks about the people he leans on, what he looks for in a leader, and why he thinks Finland could use a little more Swedishness.
When Panu Porkka stepped up to accept CEO of the Year 2025 at the Nordic Listed Leaders Gala, he didn’t talk much about himself; instead, he talked about his wife and his team. It was a telling choice for a man who runs one of the most closely watched retailer companies on the Nasdaq Helsinki, and a useful place to start, because the way Porkka leads has a lot to do with the people he chooses to lean on.
"I would not be sane without my wife," he says. Across the phases of a demanding career, she has, in his telling, made his personal and professional growth possible. The work of a listed-company chief executive is, by his own account, sometimes very lonely.
What carries him through the dark stretches is having someone who reminds him he has done his best. With two children, aged five and seven, the ambition at home is shared too: to be as good a father as the hours allow. It is, he says, team play on both sides, and most of it sits in a place that never shows up in the work or on the newspaper pages.
A team that carries the weight
Ask what makes the job rewarding, and the answer is one word: team. Porkka describes a management group he rates as genuinely professional, working to a clear shared agenda and, crucially, carrying responsibility together rather than waiting to be told.
The phrase he keeps returning to is shared ownership. The overlap between people, the way one steps in where another leaves off, would not function, he says, without it.
Like-minded people, excited about the same thing, supporting each other and taking the weight: that is what turns a lonely job into a workable one.
It is also the lens through which he reads talent. Asked what he looks for, Porkka does not hesitate. Attitude is, by a distance, the most important quality: the drive to take hold of a problem and solve it, the instinct to say "I will handle that," the ability to get things done and bring people along.
Curiosity is the second component, a genuine appetite to learn, to stay open, to ask the other person to tell you more, and to want to understand not just what they think but why. Over 25 years, he has come to trust those two signals above almost anything on a CV.
The German lesson
Much of how Porkka works was shaped in Germany. Porkka spent around eight years with Lidl, much of it in Finland and later in Germany, where he steered international sales for Northern Europe and later ran Swiss operations as chief operating officer, including a market opening there.
Germany was never foreign to him: he attended the German School of Helsinki, the language and culture are familiar, and the country is something of a second home.
The management culture left a mark. German business, as he describes it, is matter-of-fact, with the substance of the task firmly in the foreground. It prizes anticipation and planning, treats chance as something to be designed out, and rewards working out what you are trying to achieve before you set off to measure it.
After Lidl, Porkka spent four years at Tokmanni, after which he made a move into specialty retail as chief executive of the Finnish bookshop chain Suomalainen Kirjakauppa.
No hundred-day plan
Porkka did not arrive at Verkkokauppa.com with a 100-day checklist. He joined the board in April 2017 and became CEO in March 2018, succeeding founder Samuli Seppälä, who had led the company for 26 years and built it from a basement startup into one of Finland's most recognizable retail brands before moving to the board.
There was no formal brief beyond the obvious one: growth had begun to slow, and the company needed to find its next chapter.
What Porkka inherited was a business shaped by an entrepreneurial culture that had been one of its greatest strengths. Seppälä's willingness to challenge convention, move quickly, and back bold ideas had helped create a company that stood apart from its competitors. Much of the spirit that defined Verkkokauppa.com, from its relentless focus on customers to its appetite for unconventional bets, was a direct product of its founder.
The challenge was that success had also created a company that still operated much like a fast-growing startup. Many decisions, processes, and ways of working reflected years of founder-led growth. Porkka's task was not to replace that culture but to preserve its strengths while building an organization that could scale beyond any one individual.
That meant developing a stronger management structure, broadening ownership across the leadership team, documenting processes, and introducing systems that made performance more transparent for investors and analysts.
It was as much a cultural transition as an operational one: moving from a founder-led organization to a more distributed model of leadership without losing the ambition and boldness that had made the company successful in the first place.
The one-hour bet
Much of that investment went into building a logistics platform designed for fast, cost-efficient delivery. After an extensive review in 2018 and 2019, the company selected Swisslog's AutoStore system and rolled it out at scale, including what Porkka describes as the world's only installation of its kind built into a multi-storey building.
The automation did not stop at storage. Packing processes were automated, internal goods flows were redesigned, and the company moved beyond a model that had once relied solely on Posti. Together, the changes laid the foundation for some of Verkkokauppa.com's most ambitious customer-facing innovations.
However, the boldest bet was the one-hour delivery. The doubters had a clear story, he recalls. Finns want to drive to the shop, see the fridge before they buy it, and talk to a salesperson. Nobody truly needs same-day delivery, let alone same-hour.
Porkka and his team bet the opposite. Make it easy enough that the gift for tonight's birthday party arrives within the hour, and you have created real value. He saw it as the next disruption, and the company went after it with what he calls a startup mentality and a strong collective belief.
A dose of Swedishness
That belief is, if anything, stronger today. Porkka frames the present as his most accomplished stretch, a company competing hard in a tight market, with thin category margins, and still finding room to invest and rewrite how retail is done in Finland.
He closes on a national note that doubles as a leadership one. Finland's economy, he thinks, is showing signs of life, and the country could use a dose of Swedishness: more optimism, more willingness to celebrate when a company succeeds rather than defaulting to scepticism and asking why someone failed.
The point is not that Finland lacks ambition. Rather, he believes that a culture that openly welcomes success makes it easier for companies to think bigger, attract investment, and pursue growth.
After all, companies rarely grow beyond the limits of what they believe they can become.
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