Savox, Varjo explore IPOs as defense tech draws investor interest

The high unemployment rate is partly a participation story

Listeds flagged the underlying divergence on 3 August: GDP grew 0.9% quarter-on-quarter in Q2 while employed persons fell 1.1% year-on-year and hours worked fell 1.4%, on Statistics Finland's flash data. The revised accounts on 28 August cut that quarterly figure to 0.4%, so the gap between output and hours is narrower than the flash implied, but it has not closed.

Both houses now read that combination as something other than a weak economy, from different directions. Nordea points to output per hour worked rising 2.8% year-on-year in the second quarter, roughly what the previous 18 years delivered combined, and names R&D investment rising since 2018, cheap electricity and moderate wage settlements as durable drivers rather than cyclical ones. Danske points at the denominator: trend unemployment at 10.6% is the highest since 1999, but participation has risen above 69%, a level not seen since the early 1990s, so the rate reflects a growing labour force as much as weak hiring.

Danske is blunter about how thin demand for labour still is, with roughly one job vacancy for every nine unemployed jobseekers, and its Finland economist is explicit that a broader consumption recovery requires employment to improve first. Nordea expects that turn sooner. Its economist Juho Kostiainen dates it: "A positive turn in the labor market is expected next winter", on the back of hiring intentions that have improved clearly this year.

Neither is describing a labour market that has turned yet. Housing tells a similar story: prices for old dwellings fell 3.9% year-on-year in Q2 and Nordea has residential starts down to 15,000, with Danske expecting a fall of 2.8% in prices this year before a 1.0% recovery next.

What it means for boards

Two forecasts, three months apart, agreeing that output is growing and that hiring has not followed. The question for a board is which lever moves first when it does.

If Nordea is right, hiring turns this winter and the market for experienced operators tightens before the Labour Force Survey shows it. If Danske's slower read holds, headcount stays a usable lever well into 2027 and the financing cost of waiting falls rather than rises.

Boards do not have to wait for the quarterly accounts to find out which. Hiring intentions and workforce negotiations move first, and executive appointments move ahead of both. Listeds tracks workforce change negotiations and leadership appointments across Nasdaq Helsinki and First North for exactly this reason. A recovery that shows up in productivity before payroll shows up in mandates before it shows up in the statistics.

One thing to keep in mind. Danske's June numbers predate both the Q2 flash and the revised accounts, and Statistics Finland updates the quarter again on 18 September.

The seat is created by a structural vote, not a succession decision

Under the Finnish Corporate Governance Code, appointing the chief executive is the board's own duty. A demerger inverts the sequence, unavoidably. UPM announced Suur-Hamari as WISA's President and CEO on 29 April. Tapio Korpeinen as chair, Mats Nordlander as deputy chair, and Sakari Ahdekivi, Frank Herrmann, Nina Kiviranta and Emmanuelle Picard were elected as board members by UPM's extraordinary general meeting six weeks later, on 31 August. Aspo's board intended that Rolf Jansson will be elected as Chair of the Board and Matti-Mikael Koskinen as CEO of ESL Shipping Group on 3 August; ESL Shipping Group's own board will not be elected until the extraordinary general meeting on 7 December, four months after the fact.

Shareholders in both cases vote on a structure. The chief executive comes attached to it.

That is not a criticism of any of the people named — there is no other way to staff a company that does not yet exist. 

Valmet is the one that would break the freeze

WISA and ESL Shipping Group are not Large Cap businesses. WISA reported EUR 409 million in plywood sales in 2025; ESL Shipping Group generated EUR 178.4 million over the twelve months to June 2026, and Telko Group EUR 294.6 million.

Valmet is a different order. Its board announced on 24 July that it would review separating Biomaterial Solutions and Services from Process Performance Solutions into two listed companies. Process Performance Solutions runs at roughly EUR 1.7 billion in annual net sales after the Severn acquisition, with close to 70% of that now outside pulp and paper. Group net sales were about EUR 5.2 billion in 2025, leaving Biomaterial Solutions and Services as much the larger of the two, though Valmet has not disclosed a standalone figure for it in this release. Chair Pekka Vauramo said the board would proceed only if separation proved "clearly in the best interests of our shareholders." An update is due no later than the full-year 2026 results.

If it happens, one board decision produces two Large Cap-scale chief executive seats in a tier that recorded no CEO change at all in the first half of 2026. No leadership has been named for either. President and CEO Thomas Hinnerskov runs both today.

There is a second thing to watch at Valmet. CFO Katri Hokkanen leaves at the end of September; her successor Pia Aaltonen-Forsell arrives at the latest at the end of January 2027, and no interim arrangement has been disclosed. The company is weighing a two-company split across that gap.

The seat nobody has named

Aspo's demerger creates one more chief executive question than it answers. Rolf Jansson has been Aspo's CEO and, since 23 January 2026, also Managing Director of Telko. He is intended to be elected chair of ESL Shipping Group's board. Who leads Telko Group Plc, the continuing company, renamed, is not disclosed in the demerger plan. The prospectus is due in November.

What to watch

Three things follow for boards and nomination committees.

A demerger is a leadership decision at least a year before it is a market event. The CEO, the leadership team and the board of a company that will not trade until 2027 were all settled in the summer of 2026, and shareholders approved them inside a structural vote.

The route does not widen the pipeline. Every demerger-created seat named so far has gone to an executive already inside the parent, at the age profile Finnish boards have been favouring anyway.

And the counting matters. These starts land in the Q4 2026 and Q1 2027 CEO Index, not the current one, which means the index will register CEO appointments that no board actually searched for. Whether Valmet adds two Large Cap entries to that count is the open question of the next two quarters.