Valmet CFO Katri Hokkanen to depart and join Kalmar

Ville Raatikainen, a manufacturing engineering director at iLOQ with an R&D and product management background at Nokia, joins the Management Team on January 1, 2027. He is the second outside hire to the team since July, and he starts in the year the PCB maker commissions its expanded Oulu plant.

Aspocomp has appointed Ville Raatikainen (born 1984), M.Sc. (Eng.), as Chief Engineering and Technology Officer and a member of the Management Team from January 1, 2027. He currently serves as Director, Product Lifecycle and Manufacturing Engineering at iLOQ Oy and previously held R&D and product management roles at Nokia. Chief Technology Officer Mitri Mattila will stay with the company and report to Raatikainen. Mattila has worked at Aspocomp since 1997 and sat on the Management Team since 2018. 

Chief executive Manu Skyttä's endorsement speaks to production as much as to technology:

Ville has a strong track record in managing complex technical environments, improving production performance, and developing high-quality, cost-effective design operations. He has a strong background in both global listed companies like Nokia and fast-growing technology companies like iLOQ, and I am pleased to welcome him to Aspocomp. 

Six of seven Management Team members will have joined since 2024

Raatikainen follows Ilkka Lohi, who became Quality Director on September 2, 2026 in a role the company raised to Management Team level. Listeds data shows how far the renewal runs. Skyttä became chief executive in 2024 after serving as EVP, Operations at Patria, and Pekka Holopainen joined the team as operations chief the same year. Hanna-Leena Keskitalo and Terhi Launis followed in 2025, with Launis taking over finance on September, 2025. When the January 2027 line-up takes effect, Antti Ojala, a member since 2013, will be the only one whose seat predates 2024.

This is a team assembled for the expansion, not inherited from the loss years. The board supplies the sector memory. Chairman Ville Vuori is a former Incap chief executive, and director Anssi Korhonen was CTO of VTI Technologies.

The hire lands as Oulu moves from construction to yield

The Oulu program is worth more than EUR 10 million and aims to lift throughput capacity by up to 50%. Demand had already outrun the plant. At the strategy launch in November 2025, Skyttä said: “The capacity of the Oulu plant has been fully utilized throughout 2025, and demand has already exceeded our capacity.The growth in demand in our largest customer segments appears likely to continue over the next 5–10 years.” The building extension was finished on schedule and within budget, and new capacity is to be commissioned in phases throughout 2027. By July the automated warehouse was running, factory acceptance tests for new production lines had begun, and management said the second half would center on production quality and yield.

The risks are operational. Spare-parts shortages after an equipment manufacturer's bankruptcy slowed deliveries in the first quarter. Delivery times for laminates, fiberglass, resins and copper foil are lengthening and prices are rising, and the company warns that the installations may temporarily disrupt production. Those are manufacturing engineering problems, and that is the experience Raatikainen brings from iLOQ.

A record order book still has to turn into margin

The order book reached a record EUR 25.9 million at the end of June, with parts stretching to late 2027. Semiconductor customers placed 38% of second-quarter orders and defense customers 25%, while the five largest customers' share of net sales fell to 58% (75%). Profit has lagged, weighed down until the second quarter by low-margin orders agreed in 2024. Skyttä's position is unambiguous: “We expect profitability to improve in the second half of the year.”

Drone countermeasures company Sensofusion plans to list on Nasdaq Helsinki in October at a pre-money valuation of up to €1.3 billion. That would make it the first growth company to join the Helsinki exchange valued above €1 billion. The company aims to raise about €300 million in new shares, and four Finnish institutions have already committed €170 million of that.

The anchor investors are Elo, Ilmarinen, Varma and funds managed by OP Fund Management . The offering will include a public offering in Finland and an institutional offering in Finland and internationally, including in the US. The majority shareholder, Haave Oy, and some other shareholders will also sell existing shares.

A 60.8% operating margin carries the valuation

Sensofusion's revenue rose almost 90% in 2025 to €35 million, with profit of more than €23 million. In the first half of 2026, revenue grew another 122%. In the 12 months to the end of June 2026, the operating margin was 60.8%. Revenue grew at an average annual rate of 91.1% between the 2024 financial year and that 12-month period. Earlier this decade, annual revenue was around €700,000.

The company's main product, Airfence, detects hostile drones and can disable them by radio jamming. Customers include Ukraine, NASA, the Finnish Defence Forces and the Finnish Border Guard. "A large number of our customers are operational in some way, involved in war," said founder and CEO Tuomas Rasila.

The company says most of its revenue already comes from outside conflict zones. Rasila expects demand to grow whether or not the war in Ukraine continues, pointing to NATO members' commitment to spend 3.5 to 5% of GDP on defence. "There is nothing we hope for more than the end of war," he said. Chairman Timo Ahopelto put the market's annual growth at about 30%. "By 2030, the market will increase approximately fivefold," he said.

The proceeds will fund research and development in software, detection and countermeasure technologies, artificial intelligence and satellite capabilities. They will also pay for more production and testing capacity and strengthen the balance sheet.