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Otava Oy acquired 700,000 Alma Media shares today for EUR 10.2 million, nudging its ownership past a critical threshold and solidifying its position as the Finnish media company’s largest shareholder.

The move follows regulatory approval from Finland’s Competition and Consumer Authority, clearing the way for Otava to move from a strong minority position to effective control. After the transaction, Otava holds just over 40 percent of Alma Media’s shares and voting rights, Alma Media’s bourse notice shows today.

The shift is notable when set against Otava’s position only weeks earlier. At the end of March, the company held 39.22 percent of Alma Media, equivalent to roughly 32.3 million shares. 

Otava’s Chief Executive, Alexander Lindholm, struck a careful tone in outlining the company’s intentions. In February, he described Alma Media as “well managed” and emphasized continuity, adding that Otava aims “to remain a long-term, significant shareholder.”

He also underlined that the goal is “to keep Alma Media independent” and “to preserve its status as a listed company,” pointing to the stability public markets provide for future growth.

Alma Media is a digital media and marketplace company operating in 10 European countries, with brands including Kauppalehti, Talouselämä, Iltalehti, Etuovi.com, and Nettiauto. In 2025, it generated €327 million in revenue, 86 percent from digital business, and is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki.

The idea that Europe is regulating itself out of competitiveness has become a familiar refrain. It surfaces in policy debates and boardrooms alike, often as a simple explanation for why the continent lags behind the United States in technology. But according to Anu Bradford, Henry L. Moses Professor of Law and International Organization at Columbia Law School, that diagnosis misses the point.

“The debate about digital regulation is a sideshow to the main problems underlying Europe’s technical system.”

Bradford does not dismiss the importance of competitiveness. On the contrary, she frames it as fundamental. “There’s no security without prosperity. Europe needs more economic growth, and technology is key to that.”

But focusing on regulation, she argues, risks distracting from deeper structural constraints that have shaped Europe’s tech ecosystem for years.

A fragmented market at home

The most immediate of these constraints is internal fragmentation. Despite decades of integration, Europe remains far from a seamless market.

“There’s no true digital single market in Europe. We still have a very fragmented marketplace.” For companies, this makes scaling fundamentally different from the United States. Instead of expanding within one large market, European firms must navigate many.

“European tech companies have to scale across 27 different markets, with different languages, consumer preferences, and regulatory fragmentation.”

The cost of this fragmentation is not abstract. “If you translate those internal barriers into tariff equivalents, it’s about 60% for goods and close to 100% for services.”

These are not formal tariffs, but they illustrate how difficult it is to operate across Europe as if it were a single market.

Why scaling remains difficult

Bradford zeroes in on four issues that explain why this competitiveness problem persists: market fragmentation, capital, risk culture, and talent.

She has already pointed to fragmentation as a core constraint. Capital is another. “European companies do well in early funding rounds, but when they need larger amounts of capital, they often turn to US investors or get acquired.”

Risk culture also plays a role. “In Europe, if you fail, you’re often done. It’s very hard to raise money again.”

She contrasts this with the United States. “In the US, failure is part of the model. After bankruptcy, investors may still back you if you’re working on something ambitious.”

Talent flows reinforce the gap. “Europe is losing talent to the US, where the capital, top universities, and concentration of talent are.”

Taken together, these factors describe a system where innovation exists, but scaling remains constrained.

Anu Bradford is the Henry L. Moses professor of law and international organization at Columbia Law School and director of its European Legal Studies Center. Her research focuses on international trade law, EU law, and antitrust.

A world without a dominant model

The global environment is also shifting. The expectation that one model of technology governance will prevail is fading.

“There won’t be a single regulatory model that becomes global.” Bradford explores this dynamic in Digital Empires, where she outlines competing American, Chinese, and European approaches to regulating technology.

In the interview, she notes that each model faces its own pressures. “They’re all having a moment, but also facing headwinds.”

The result is not convergence, but coexistence.

The rise of tech sovereignty

For companies, this fragmentation is already reshaping strategy.

“Tech companies are now expected to offer sovereign solutions, where governments retain control over data and operations.”

Meeting those expectations often requires duplication. “That means replicating infrastructure, like building data centers in different parts of the world.”

Global operations are becoming less uniform and more complex, as firms adapt to political and regulatory demands.

EU gender quotas regulating the composition of listed companies’ boards will enter into force this year. According to Emilia Kullas, attention should shift from the numbers to the underlying causes and structures.

As in other EU countries, a directive will come into force in Finland this year, introducing gender quotas for the boards of listed companies. The directive applies to all listed companies operating in the EU with more than 250 employees. In practice, the change means that at least 40 percent of non-executive board seats must be held by the underrepresented gender, as an NLL article points out. 

Emilia Kullas, director of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA (Elinkeinoelämän Valtuuskunta), argues that quotas may correct the numbers, but they cannot compensate for decades of narrow leadership pipelines and cultural assumptions about who belongs at the top.

“I’ve been critical towards the quotas because I think that the quotas don’t solve the Finnish structural problems,” Kullas says, adding that while quotas mandate outcomes, they do little to prepare candidates for board and governance roles. 

Kullas has been leading EVA since 2019. EVA is a think tank that is funded by the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) and the Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers (TT) Fund.

The numbers, at first glance, suggest steady progress. Across the EU, women hold 34 percent of board positions in the largest listed companies, unchanged from the previous year, according to the Gender Equality Index 2025. Finland’s score is 38 percent, whereas market leader France has 47 percent. France has had a law on gender quotas for the boards of large listed companies in place since 2011. The quotas have since been extended to also cover companies’ executive management teams.

Yet even in countries with long-standing quotas, the underlying talent structures have proved slow to change.

The pipeline narrows early

In Kullas’ view, the bottleneck sits much earlier and cuts both ways. Career choices in Finland remain highly gendered, and breaking that pattern requires change from individuals and institutions alike. It would be beneficial, she argues, for both men and women to choose a wider range of professional paths. 

At the same time, companies themselves need to broaden their assumptions about what leadership potential looks like. Senior executives and nomination committees should consciously expand their recruitment lens instead of defaulting to familiar profiles.

“Diversity is well established in research as a source of organizational strength. Repeatedly selecting the same kind of candidate may feel safe, but it also limits perspective and reinforces the very pipelines that quotas are meant to correct.”

These structural constraints help explain why regulatory pressure is now being felt so acutely inside companies.

Boards feel the pressure

Inside Finnish companies, the upcoming rule update is already influencing behaviour, Kullas says.

“The effect has already been felt for at least a year. Especially on the smaller side, companies are scrambling to get new members to their boards who are not men.”

From a low starting point, progress can look dramatic. “At the beginning of the year 2000, if you took the 10 biggest listed companies in Finland, probably one or two had women on the board,” Kullas says. “The rest of them didn’t.”

Since then, representation has improved. But the pipeline feeding boards has remained selective. “Our path to the CEO position used to be very, very narrow,” she says. “And that hasn’t changed a lot in the bigger picture.”

Cultural norms are set long before board nominations

Part of the reason is education. “In our society, you end up being a CEO if you’re an engineer or if you have studied economics, especially finance,” Kullas says. “Studying marketing and ending up being a CEO of one of our biggest companies, it’s not possible if you’re a Finnish woman.”

These filters operate long before board nominations begin. Education choices, cultural expectations, and early career signalling narrow the field decades in advance. “In Finland, we have men’s careers, and we have women’s careers. We have very, very strict gender roles still. It starts so early, when kids are nine or 10 years old.”

By the time board nominations are discussed, the pool of candidates has already narrowed. “The quotas don’t fix that,” she says. Quotas do not change the process as they intervene only at the final stage.

Another constraint lies in how Finnish companies define board competence. “Owners tend to prioritize prior experience, and in Finland, this emphasis is particularly strong,” Kullas says, adding that as a result, the average age of board members remains high.

Few companies, especially large ones, treat board seats as an opportunity for structured sparring by deliberately bringing in younger individuals with different professional backgrounds. “This is a pity and a missed opportunity,” Kullas laments.

Why quotas still matter

Despite their limitations, Kullas is clear that quotas are not meaningless. “They are already having an effect,” she says.

“One good thing about quotas is that they force the nomination committees to make an effort,” Kullas says. “Very often you need to open up your eyes and start looking.”

Once that effort is made, change tends to accelerate. “Once you have one or two women board members, it’s much easier for the company to continue on that path,” she says.

Talent has never been the constraint

But does Finland have enough qualified talent? 

“Absolutely. Of course, we have enough qualified women,” Kullas says, recalling some counterarguments. “That was the main explanation in the early 2000s. They said women are not interested, or that there’s nobody on this level. “They just didn’t see them.”

Still, for Kullas, quotas should remain a means, not an end. “A quota is a vehicle,” she says. “It shouldn’t be a goal in itself.”

Lasting success, in her view, would be visible far beyond board statistics. It would show up in broader educational paths to leadership, more women founding growth companies, and fewer assumptions about what a chief executive is expected to look like.

Whether the new rules coming into force next year will meaningfully bend Finland’s cultural norms remains an open question. Kullas is cautiously optimistic, noting that Finnish companies tend to take compliance seriously. 

“Positive change is not only possible,” she says. “It’s also likely.”

About Emilia Kullas:

Emilia Kullas is a director of Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA. She has broken the glass ceiling twice, becoming the first woman to lead EVA and the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the Finnish business weekly Talouselämä. She has written three books about investing for women together with Ninni Myllyoja. 

Strategy is no longer an annual exercise or a controlled process with a beginning and an end. It sits permanently on the board table, constantly challenged by forces that move faster than corporate cycles. Among these forces, one has become utterly inescapable: artificial intelligence.

What changed is not only the technology itself, but the parameters of the world in which we operate. When new interfaces like ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot made intelligence universally accessible and computation globally scalable, the competitive landscape shifted in a way that many companies still underestimate. AI is a fundamental rewiring of how businesses are built, how brands are discovered, how decisions are made, and how power is distributed.

In the future, brands will not primarily live on websites, campaigns, or controlled touchpoints. They will live in conversations. Not only the ones between people, but in the dialogues happening inside large language models — the “thinking substrate” of the AI era. Consumers and investors are already asking these models questions like: “Why do people choose this product?” “Is this company trustworthy?” “What are the alternatives?” If your brand is not part of those conversations, in the right context and with the right information, it effectively does not exist.

This applies equally to consumer brands and to B2B companies, professional services, and listed companies. In a world where people no longer search but converse, discoverability becomes conversational, not algorithmic. Traditional SEO is being replaced by something more fluid: the ability to be found, understood, and recommended within AI-driven dialogues.

Leaders need to internalize that this is not a communication issue; it is a resilience and competitiveness issue. Corporate thinking has been shaped over decades — in some cases, half a century — with assumptions built for a linear, often predictable world. But AI introduces competitors who didn’t exist before, markets you’ve never looked at, and dialogues you cannot control. It produces narratives about your company by reading everything: disclosures, earnings calls, consumer reviews, Reddit threads, academic papers, news cycles, and thousands of micro-signals across languages and regions. And often, unfortunately, also hallucinates the answers. 

For a listed company, this creates a new governance challenge. Disclosures are regulated. AI conversations are not. Yet they shape investor sentiment, consumer perception, employer reputation, and strategic positioning. What happens when your carefully crafted regulatory announcement is reduced to a single sentence by an AI model that interprets it differently from your intention? What happens when the model draws conclusions from unofficial sources and merges them into one narrative? And how do you govern something that spreads across languages, markets, and platforms without boundaries?

This is why the board must now ask: Are we truly AI-ready as a leadership body? Readiness is not about whether the company has pilots, models, or dashboards. It is about whether the board understands the implications of autonomy, speed, scale, and non-linearity. Some boards have already limited the use of tools out of caution. Others have leaned in and allowed automated transcription, analysis, and model-assisted briefings in their governance processes. The next step will be deciding how much autonomy to give to agents. This discussion will change industries.

A brand in the age of AI is not a visual identity or a messaging framework. It is a living information system that moves through global models. It is shaped as much by earned media as by AI-mediated interpretations. It does not respect borders or linguistic limits. You may suddenly find your company referenced in a university case study in a country you’ve never operated in, simply because the model connected your data to a theme.

Boards and leadership teams must therefore understand that the relationship between formal and informal information has changed. People trust AI tools even when they have not followed every link or verified every source. This creates a responsibility for companies to ensure that the data feeding these systems is correct, coherent, and strategically aligned.

We have reached the moment where AI must be brought into the core context of the company: brand, reputation, disclosures, marketing, sales, stakeholder networks, internal processes, and governance. It is not enough to talk about what AI could enable. The question now is what AI will do if we do nothing, because the world around us is already shifting.

In the end, the board’s responsibility is not to predict the future but to prepare the organization to operate in it. That preparation begins with clarity, courage, and a shift in mindset.

And it ends with three unavoidable questions that belong on every board agenda:

1. How will our brand be found and understood in AI-driven conversations?
   
   

2. How do we ensure our data, disclosures, and narratives remain accurate as models interpret them?
   
   

3. How much autonomy are we willing to grant to AI agents, and where does responsibility lie when they act?

These questions define the next era of brand leadership. They also define which companies will remain relevant in a world where intelligence is no longer scarce, but universal and instantly accessible.

About Kati Sulin:

Kati Sulin is a Nordic business leader with experience in digital transformation across companies such as DNA Oyj, Terveystalo, Ifolor, and Fazer. Her work covers digital operations, e-commerce, data use, and customer processes in multiple industries. 

Sulin has held leadership roles in strategy and digital development and has worked with projects involving brand development, AI deployment, automation, and operational renewal.

Sulin serves on the boards of Apetit Oyj, Madara, LähiTapiola Henkivakuutusyhtiö, and Viestimedia Oy, and has previously served on the boards of Pihlajalinna, Witted Megacorp, and Kalevala Koru Oy.