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A family transfer twenty years in the making moved 12.18% of Sanoma into a single company. Eight days later, the body that proposes Sanoma's next board had two pension insurers sitting on it — and the family branch that used to hold half its seats held one.

On 9 September 2026, Sanoma disclosed that Robin Langenskiöld and Rafaela Seppälä had transferred their entire shareholdings — 19,928,117 shares, 12.18% of the company — to RR & Co Ab, a newly formed vehicle owned by their children and grandchildren. The price was €7.2428 a share, €144,335,366 in total, executed on Nasdaq Helsinki. The stated purpose was to hold the family's stake under one roof and to avoid, in the filing's words, "avoidable fragmentation of ownership".

Read as a €144 million exit, the trade is misread. Nothing left the family.

The staircase and the cliff

The two siblings arrived at the same destination by opposite routes.

Robin Langenskiöld held 12,273,371 Sanoma shares in July 2006 and 12,273,371 in August 2026 — the same figure in all 239 monthly snapshots of the Listeds register. His percentage drifted from 7.70% to 7.50%, but that was dilution, not disposal. His only change of position came in March 2014, when Antti Herlin added 2,706,979 shares in a single month and moved him from second-largest shareholder to third.

His sister began at 12,273,370 shares — one share fewer, the signature of a divided inheritance. Her holding then fell four times, and each fall is matched, to the share, by increases in holders carrying her family's names:

Four transfers, 4,618,624 shares, each split into exact halves between two branches of descendants — and 12,273,370 less 4,618,624 leaves 7,654,746, the holding she transferred in September. A register records positions rather than counterparties, so the pairing is inference rather than disclosed fact. It is a strong one: a seller's decrease matching two buyers' increases to the single share, four times across fifteen years, is not a market coincidence.

So Seppälä handed her stake down across eighteen years and five tranches. Langenskiöld handed his down in one afternoon, after two decades of not moving a share.

A precedent two lines up the register

This is the second time in three years that a roughly 12% personal holding in Sanoma has been re-papered into a company. Antti Herlin built his stake from 100,000 shares in 2006 to 19,816,800 by March 2023. That April, his name dropped out of the top holders list and Holding Manutas Oy appeared in second place with 19,785,000 shares. The 31,800-share difference has sat under his own name ever since, unchanged.

Sanoma's second- and third-largest positions are therefore now both family holdings inside corporate wrappers, created three years apart by the same logic.

What the consolidation was fixing

By August 2026 this one branch of the family occupied eleven separate lines of Sanoma's register, holding 28,241,098 shares between them — 17.24% of the company, spread across three generations and four surnames. The September transfer gathered 12.18% of that into a single vehicle. The remaining 5.06% stays where it was, held individually by descendants.

That is the argument the filing makes without spelling it out. The fragmentation it sets out to prevent is visible in the register, name by name, and it is the direct product of eighteen years of orderly succession. Handing a stake down in installments preserves a family's economics and slowly dismantles its ability to act as one shareholder. RR & Co Ab is the correction — and the reason the larger position, Langenskiöld's untouched 12,273,371 shares, was never handed down at all until a vehicle existed to receive it.

Ilmarinen Mutual Pension Insurance Company was named Defence Owner of the Year 2026 on Monday evening at Valkoinen Sali in Helsinki, at the first Listeds Investor Event – Defence. The award is new, and so is the thing it measures. Not how much an institution owns, but what it has done with the ownership.

Finland has prizes for companies and prizes for chief executives. Owners have gone unrewarded.

“In Finland we reward companies and executives, but not owners. We wanted to create a category that measures an owner's actions: where the capital went, and what was done with the ownership”

The jury scored what Ilmarinen did, not what it held

The jury was chaired by Tiina Olkkonen, founder and chair of IR Partners, and included Sanna Andersson of Euroclear Nordics, Kyösti Jurvelin of Talouselämä and Klaus Ilmonen of Hannes Snellman.

Three things decided it. Ilmarinen anchored Reaktor's listing earlier this year and is now the company's largest institutional owner. It joined a funding round for the unlisted ICEYE. And it sits on the shareholders' nomination boards of roughly 40 Finnish listed companies every year, which is a direct lever on who ends up in those boardrooms.

“Defence capability is not created by public defence spending alone. Behind it you need competitive companies, innovation and patient private capital. In a changed security environment, institutional investors have an important role in making sure that defence and dual-use innovations born in Finland have the conditions to grow into internationally successful companies. That is why we wanted to reward an owner that does not merely invest in the sector but, through its own actions, is helping to build it.”

That last point is the one the jury kept returning to. Defence and dual-use companies are growing quickly, and the competence their boards need is moving just as fast.

Eight companies pitched, five of them listed

Gofore, Kesla, Savox Communications and Aspocomp Group, all on Nasdaq Helsinki, and Betolar from Nasdaq First North pitched the defence and dual-use side of their businesses to a room of professional investors. Audicin, Njord and AGATE Sensors followed in the growth round with three minutes each.

Martti Wallin, venture partner at Sparkmind Capital and a past chairman of the Association of Finnish Defence and Aerospace Industries, opened the evening with a conversation on what investors and leaders get wrong about defence.