Finland's boards are replacing chief executives briskly, just not at the top of the market, and not with women. The two blanks say more than the twelve appointments do.

In a market as small and closely watched as Finland's, the interest in a quarterly count of chief executives usually lies in the names. This quarter it lies in the gaps. The Listeds CEO Index — Finland for the second quarter of 2026, produced in partnership with SAM Headhunting, records twelve new listed-company chief executives and, around them, a single number that keeps recurring. It is zero. None of the twelve is a woman. And none of the country's largest companies changed its leader at all. It is a second quarter running with the top of the market completely still, a year after more than a third of those same companies replaced their CEO.

The renewal is real, just not at the top

That stillness is not a market slowing down. Below the largest companies, renewal is running at pace. Twenty-five new chief executives took up their roles across Finnish listed companies in the first half of 2026, a rate of about 50 a year against the 43 recorded across all of 2025, and it sits on top of a market that has already renewed roughly a third of its CEOs within eighteen months.

Every one of the twelve second-quarter changes happened below Large Cap: seven in Small Cap, four on First North, one in Mid Cap. The churn is real. It has simply stopped reaching the top.

For a board, that combination is the point. "Many boards have already done the groundwork on a new direction and new focus areas, and where the sitting CEO cannot take the company there, they act," says Leena Hellfors, Managing Director of SAM Headhunting. "Succession has become a continuous capability, not an occasional project." 

“Many boards have already done the groundwork on a new direction and new focus areas, and where the sitting CEO cannot take the company there, they act. Succession has become a continuous capability, not an occasional project.”

Across most of the market, that capability is visibly in use. At the very top, it is switched off.

Why the top sits still

The freeze reflects a specific instinct about the largest jobs, and the rest of the quarter shows the same instinct at work in who gets hired. The twelve new CEOs took up their roles at an average age of about 54, roughly four years older than the age at which the sitting population first became chief executives. Half were promoted from inside, and only two of the twelve came from outside Finland. Where boards did move, they reached for the experienced, the internal, the known.

"Leading a listed company is a genuinely different job, and boards look for proven experience and judgement," Hellfors notes. "There is a deep pool of capable, more senior leaders at the moment, so an experienced profile is often the natural choice." The index bears out the gradient: the largest companies appoint their CEOs oldest, and in practice do not hand the seat to a first-time or younger leader, which is understandable.

No women in Q2, but two are starting in Q3

The number that drew the most attention is the one that reads as a step back. Not one of the twelve new CEOs was a woman, against a sitting-population share of just 8.1%, and across the half-year only one of twenty-five appointments went to a woman. A market that consistently buys proven experience over runway narrows its pipeline of younger leaders, and does the same to an already thin pipeline of women.

The picture is not static, though. Because the index tracks the date a CEO starts, the turn is already visible. Two women are recorded as taking up CEO roles in the third quarter, both showing in the data before the quarter has even closed.

When the top does move, it moves as a team

There is a second reason the frozen tier matters: a CEO change is rarely a single change. 

Across the twelve companies that did change leader in Q2, management teams saw four arrivals and ten departures in the weeks that followed, concentrated in a few companies rather than spread evenly, but consistent in direction. 

“A CEO change is rarely a single appointment. The board has usually set the direction already, and the new CEO arrives to execute it, which is what pulls a wider management-team rebuild behind it. Increasingly the assignment is a whole core team rather than one person.”

Which means the stillness at the top is storing up scale. When one of Finland's largest companies does finally change its CEO, and eventually one will, the board, its investors and its management team should expect not a single appointment but a leadership-team change playing out over the following quarters.

Read the index here

Boards were quieter than at any point since the spring meetings. The month's only board departure happened because a director took a finance job.

According to Listeds data, Nordic listed companies recorded 30 board and management changes in July, down from 69 in June. Boards accounted for 2 — one appointment and one departure, against 18 recorded in June. Management teams recorded 28: 8 appointments, 16 departures, four role changes, nearly half of June's 51.

The drop is seasonal. What sits underneath it is not.

On 24 July, Finnair announced that Pia Aaltonen-Forsell was leaving as finance chief and that Jussi Siitonen would take the role from 1 November. On the same day, Valmet named Aaltonen-Forsell as its own next CFO, starting at the latest at the end of January 2027.One move, disclosed from both ends, three minutes apart.

Follow it in both directions and five Helsinki-listed companies sit on the same line.

Fiskars Group disclosed on 24 June that Siitonen, its CFO and deputy to the chief executive, would leave after August. Niko Haavisto, previously CFO at Nokian Tyres and CapMan, took the Fiskars finance role on 10 August. Siitonen went to Finnair on 1 November, and resigned from Finnair's board on 24 July to take it. Aaltonen-Forsell goes to Valmet, replacing Katri Hokkanen, who leaves at the end of September after nearly four years in the role and close to twenty years at the company. Hokkanen goes to Kalmar on 1 October, replacing Sakari Ahdekivi, who steps down on 30 September and stays in a transition role to 31 December. Ahdekivi is now among the proposed board members of WISA Group, the plywood business UPM is demerging.

Election to the WISA Group board is conditional on UPM's extraordinary general meeting of 31 August 2026 and completion of the demerger is expected on or about 31 October 2026.
Sources: company stock exchange releases, 24 June - 7 August 2026

Five companies. Four finance vacancies, each filled from another listed company — and the chain ends at a board seat.

“There is no shortage of Finnish finance chiefs. There is just a short list, and every board most likely knows who is on it.”

The disclosure sequence is worth noting on its own. Fiskars named Siitonen's exit on 24 June; Finnair named his destination on 24 July. A departing company discloses the vacancy roughly a month before the hiring company discloses the hire. Under the Nasdaq Helsinki inside-information regime that is the system working as intended, and it means the market reads a single move in two instalments — usually without knowing, at the first instalment, which company is at the other end. August and completion of the demerger is

Between December 2025 and August 2026, at least ten CFOs changed seats across Nasdaq Helsinki and First North. Read as a set, one feature stands out: every incoming CFO already held the title at another listed company. None was an internal promotion. None was a first-time CFO.

On 5 August 2026, Digia named Kimmo Kärkkäinen its next CFO, recruited from Vincit, itself a listed IT company. We got curious: is it normal for a Finnish listed company to hire its CFO from within the industry, straight out of another public company's finance seat? So we checked our own data, and got the answer.

On its own, the Digia appointment is a routine leadership-moves story, the kind Listeds covers dozens of times a year. But set it beside every other CFO move Listeds has tracked over the past months, and a pattern appears that no single release shows on its own.

Ten CFO hires, and not one was promoted from within

Across the ten moves in the table below, not one incoming CFO was promoted from within their new company, and not one was taking a CFO title for the first time. Every appointee arrived already holding the CFO role at another listed company.

That is the story worth telling. It is a stronger, more defensible claim than the "domino chains" it is tempting to draw from the same data, because, as set out below, chains are partly an artefact of how you connect the dots, whereas the absence of internal promotions is a genuine, countable pattern.

Ten CFOs changed companies between December 2025 and August 2026

This is not a sample. It is every CFO change Listeds tracked across Nasdaq Helsinki and First North in the window, verified against primary company releases.

Two dating notes, in the interest of precision: Minni Lempinen was acting CFO at Endomines before KH Group; and Tuomas Mäkipeska's move to Kemira was announced in October 2025 and took effect on 1 April 2026. The window is therefore best described as December 2025 to August 2026, not "the first seven months of 2026"; three of the ten were announced in 2025.

The "domino chains" oversell it; the real pattern is what's missing

It is tempting to connect these into cascades, because several of the seats link up. But a note of analytical caution belongs here: every CFO departure creates a vacancy that someone fills, so almost any set of same-role moves can be drawn as a "chain." Tracing a seat backwards through its last three occupants does not prove the moves caused one another. It mostly proves that finance-chief roles, once vacated, get filled.

So the chains below are offered as illustration, not as a discovered structure. They show how tightly the same small pool recirculates, but the load-bearing finding remains the one above: no internal promotions, no first-timers.

Chain 1: Industrial & transport circuit

Niko Haavisto left Nokian Tyres for Fiskars Group; Jussi Siitonen left Fiskars for Finnair; Pia Aaltonen-Forsell left Finnair for Valmet; Katri Hokkanen left Valmet for Kalmar. Each departure vacated the seat the next executive filled. The Finnair-to-Valmet link was confirmed in the companies' own releases; the Valmet-to-Kalmar and Fiskars-to-Finnair links likewise.

Chain 2: Energy & healthtech circuit

Jukka Kainulainen moved from Kempower to Revenio Group; Robin Pulkkinen then moved from Revenio Group to F-Secure.

Chain 3: the Digia hub

Kristiina Simola arrived at Digia from Digitalist Group in 2017; Kimmo Kärkkäinen arrives from Vincit in 2026. Two different companies, feeding the same seat, nine years apart.

For three years, the reinvention of the marketing chief into a growth owner has been reshaping the C-suite of America's Fortune 500. Finland's listed-company management teams never carried many CMOs to begin with, yet the same shift is now surfacing on Nasdaq Helsinki, and it arrives as a question for boards and CEOs, not for marketing.

On 15 September 2025, the Chief Marketing and Sustainability Officer role at Rebl Group ended. Among the Chief titles the small-cap group kept was a different one: Chief Growth Officer. Taken alone, it is a single management change at one listed company. Taken against the wider record, it is one of the clearest Finnish instances yet of a shift documented at scale in the United States.
On 7 July 2026, Forrester published its third annual analysis of marketing leadership in the Fortune 500. Marketing executives who sit on the top team or report to the CEO are now found at 52% of F500 companies, down from 58% a year earlier.

The "chief marketing officer" title itself is used by just 36%, down from 49% in a single year. Forrester's Ian Bruce argues the decline reading misses the point: the role is not disappearing, it is being reinvented into chief growth officer, chief commercial officer and chief customer officer, giving one leader accountability for growth across the whole customer lifecycle.

Finland barely had CMOs to lose on the management teams

The temptation is to read this as an American story. Across the 188 companies actively listed on Nasdaq Helsinki and First North, seven have a standalone Chief Marketing Officer (not seven percent, seven companies), and not one of them is a large cap. All 33 Finnish large caps have zero. Where Forrester is tracking the CMO's decline at the top of the US market, the top of the Finnish market had already finished that decline before the story began.

But the absence of the CMO title is the wrong thing to fix on. The part of the American trend that matters is not the marketing chief leaving; it is where the growth mandate goes next, and who at the top table is made to own the number. On that question, the change is visible in Finland too.

Rebl kept a growth title where a marketing one used to sit. Raute appointed Arto Kaikkola as Chief Commercial Officer effective 5 May 2026, a seat that folds sales, marketing, communications and commercial excellence into a single owner. And the inflow follows the same shape, though not the same title. Of nine senior marketing hires across Finnish listed companies in 2025 and 2026, only one — Framery's acting CMO — holds a marketing-only Chief title. Two more reached Chief level with marketing bundled into something else: sustainability at Gofore, commercial duties at Raute. The remaining six arrived below Chief level entirely, as EVPs, SVPs, VPs or a Director. The new senior marketing hire in Finland rarely gets a Chief title of any kind, let alone a marketing-only one.

Where the CMO title does survive, it clusters among recent arrivals. Companies that listed in 2021 or later carry a standalone CMO at four times the rate of those listed earlier (9% against 2%), and hold any Chief-level marketing seat at more than triple the rate (16% against 5%). But this is not evidence that going public designs the role in: in three of the five recent-listing CMOs the title predates the IPO, so the pattern is really the marketing title fading among long-listed incumbents, not newer companies inventing it. For boards, that is the point. The growth-ownership question is sharpest exactly where most of the market sits, at the long-established companies that have already let the marketing title go.

Finnish listed companies saw 12 new CEOs take up the role in the second quarter of 2026, against 13 in Q1. Combined, the first half of 2026 has produced 25 new CEO starts, an H1 run rate of about 50 a year, still above the ~44 recorded across all of 2025. On a quarterly basis Q2 annualizes to roughly 48, easing from Q1's own 52-annualized reading.

On diversity the quarter brought no movement: all 12 who started were men, leaving the market-wide female CEO share at 8.1%. Large Cap recorded zero changes for a second consecutive quarter. The age profile, which had swung sharply younger in Q1, moved back up — and past the norm. Q2's new CEOs took up the role at an average age of 54, against an active population that started at about 50. Renewal continues, but the profile of who is renewed keeps shifting quarter to quarter.

Large Cap stays quiet

The most interesting continuity from Q1 is where CEO change still isn't happening. More than one in three Large Cap companies changed their CEO in 2025. Since then the tier has stood still: two full quarters, all of Q1 and all of Q2 2026, without a single new CEO starting. All 12 of the Q2 changes happened below Large Cap.

That freeze at the top is the quarter's defining pattern. Every one of the twelve changes landed in Small Cap, First North or Mid Cap — the segments that, on the index's own figures, tend to hire their CEOs youngest — while the largest companies, which take on their leaders at the oldest ages, chose not to move at all. The contrast points to something specific about how a large-cap board approaches the job.

By industry, the changes were more spread out than in Q1: Consumer Discretionary led with 4 (Duell, Martela, Tallink Grupp, Wetteri), followed by Industrials with 3 (Boreo, Summa Defence, Wulff-Yhtiöt), Financials and Technology with 2 each (Alisa Pankki, Titanium; Canatu, Siili Solutions), and Real Estate with 1 (Investors House).

The external-hire spike cools off

Of the 12 new CEOs who started in Q2 2026, 6 were external hires, 5 were promoted from within management, and 1 came from the board — Aarne Simula's move from the Wetteri board into the CEO seat is the only board-to-CEO transition of the quarter. That puts the external share at 50%, down from Q1's 62% but still running above the 47% share recorded across 2025 as a whole.

Two of the five internal promotions, however, were already serving as interim/deputy CEO: Aki Gynther at Alisa Pankki and Tomi Virtanen at Duell. Measured against the 10 starts that did change the leader, the external share is 6 of 10, or 60%.

New CEOs start older than the market norm

New CEOs who started in Q2 2026 averaged roughly 54 years of age (based on birth year) — about four years older than the ~50 average age at which the active population started, and a reversal of Q1's dip to 49–50.

At the younger end, Maximilian Slawinski (Canatu) and Peep Jalakas (Tallink Grupp), both born in 1985, stand out; at the older end, Jukka Akselin (Investors House), born in 1961, reflects continued demand for experienced operators in smaller, asset-heavy businesses. Q1's "renewal at the margins" signal did not carry through the second quarter.

“Leading a listed company is a genuinely different job, and boards look for proven experience and judgement. There is a deep pool of capable, more senior leaders at the moment, so an experienced profile is often the natural choice.”

Gender representation: a sharp step backward

Every one of the 12 new CEOs who started in Q2 2026 is male. That's a full reversal from Q1's already-thin 7.7% (1 of 13), and it pulls the point-of-entry figure well below the 8.1% share of women in the active CEO population (15 of 186). Two conseMany boards have already done the grouncutive quarters without meaningful female representation among new starters is a stronger signal than either quarter alone; across H1 2026 as a whole, 1 of 25 starts went to a woman — 4.0%, or roughly half the active-population share.

The baseline itself is moving the same way. The 9.3% figure carried forward from the 2025 CEO Index stands at 8.1% on the current snapshot, so representation is eroding through attrition among sitting CEOs as well as through the pipeline of new starters.

International hires remain the exception

The quarter saw two international starts. Maximilian Slawinski (German) joined Canatu and Peep Jalakas (Estonian) joined Tallink Grupp, leaving the Finnish share of new CEOs at 83.3% (10 of 12). As in Q1, international hires reflect specific sector or turnaround expertise rather than a broader shift in recruitment patterns.

The aggregate mix barely moves, and Q2 shows why: the intake arrived at almost exactly the rate already embedded in the population. Non-Finnish CEOs hold 16.7% of active roles (31 of 186), and non-Finnish starts made up 16.7% of the quarter's intake (2 of 12).

Internationalization is concentrated at the top of the market. Large Cap CEOs are 56.2% Finnish, against 80.8% in Mid Cap, 91.1% in Small Cap and 95.7% on First North. But it is not confined there: 17 of the 31 non-Finnish CEOs sit below Large Cap.

A CEO change is rarely a single change

Across the 12 companies that changed CEO in Q2 2026, at least 6 saw some kind of management-team change around the same time.

Not every departure was necessarily tied to the CEO change. Some were already planned. A few "exits" were really just a smaller management team, not someone leaving the company. Several companies saw no management-team change at all.

“A CEO change is rarely a single appointment. The board has usually set the direction already, and the new CEO arrives to execute it, which is what pulls a wider management-team rebuild behind it. Increasingly the assignment is a whole core team rather than one person.”

At a glance

About the data

The analysis draws on the Listeds Executive Intelligence platform and covers CEOs who started in the role at Nasdaq Helsinki main list and First North listed companies between 1 April and 30 June 2026. The index is keyed to the date each CEO takes up the position, not the date the appointment was announced. Active-population figures reflect a snapshot of 186 CEO roles as of 30 June 2026. Deputy CEO/Interim CEO promotions to CEO are counted as seperate CEO start.

Role equivalents to CEO are included in the count; titles in the dataset include President and CEO as well as Chairman of the Management Board. Companies listed on Nasdaq Helsinki are included regardless of country of domicile. Market-cap segments reflect each company's classification as of the snapshot date, not the start date.

A CEO start that confirms a sitting interim or deputy CEO is counted and classified as an internal promotion. The external-hire share is reported on all starts, with a secondary figure excluding interim confirmations, since those do not change who leads the company.

Age figures are calculated from birth year.

Baseline figures for 2025 and Q1 2026 are carried forward from the CEO Index — Finland | 2025 and the CEO Index — Finland | Q1 2026.

Leadership activity eased in June, but companies continued adding senior executives as board changes fell sharply following the AGM season.

According to Listeds data, Finnish listed companies recorded 69 board and management changes during the month, down 26% from May's 93 changes. Boards accounted for 18 changes, a 53% decline from May, while management teams recorded 51 changes, down just 7% month over month.

The figures suggest that the annual governance cycle has largely run its course. After April's extensive board renewal and May's return to executive hiring, June was characterized by targeted leadership appointments aimed at strengthening operating teams rather than reshaping governance.

Board renewal slows after AGM season

Board activity declined sharply from the previous two months, with changes concentrated in only a handful of companies rather than spread across the Finnish listed market.

Summa Defence recorded the month's largest board renewal with 10 board changes after shareholders ordered a special audit into the company's finances and replaced the entire board, as reported by Listeds earlier. Juha Pinomaa was appointed chair alongside new members Ville Jaakonsalo, Ville Heikkinen, Tapani Kiiski, Jyrki Heinimaa, and Mikko Haapala. 

Biotech company Biohit followed with three board changes, appointing Kari Syrjänen as chair and Anssi Kariola as a board member. Car dealership Wetteri added Aarne Simula, the largest shareholder, to its board while Mika Aho assumed the role of chair, continuing the leadership renewal that has characterized the company lately. Listeds reported in June that Simula has returned as CEO while Wetteri plans to return to a positive adjusted operating profit this year. QPR Software also strengthened its board with the appointment of Patrik Sallner. 

The pattern differed from the previous two months. Rather than broad-based board renewal across the market, June's governance changes were concentrated in a handful of companies.