Managers' transactions

The share has given back nearly half its June rally. Once the automatic fee-shares are removed, the insiders still trading on their own account lean one way, and it's the opposite way from the country's biggest pension funds.

On July 24, Nokia’s board chair Timo Ihamuotila bought 60,000 Nokia shares at a volume-weighted €8.45 — about €507,000 of his own money, disclosed three days later under the EU Market Abuse Regulation. He was buying into a slide that took the Helsinki-listed share from a €14.805 close on June 3 to €7.556 on July 29, a fall of about 49%. The stock still trades well above the roughly €3.4 it changed hands at a year ago, before Nokia's USD 1 billion NVIDIA AI-RAN partnership in October 2025 set off a run that carried it more than fourfold into June.

Not every insider "purchase" is a market call. Nokia's April 9 AGM set 2026 board fees at €440,000 for the Chair, €210,000 for the Vice Chair and €185,000 for each other member, and resolved that "approximately 40% of the annual fee will be paid in Nokia shares" — shares the directors must hold for their first three years,  so the near-identical share receipts booked for non-executives on May 4, and executives' incentive allocations (Jan 14, May 4, July 9), are compensation. Strip those out, and what's left are the voluntary, open-market trades.

On their own account, the flow tilts to buying.

Ihamuotila had already bought €537,400 on Jan 30 (close €5.42) and €454,805 on Apr 28 (close €9.41). His July 24 purchase was followed by CTO and AI Officer Pallavi Mahajan (around €520,426) and technology standards chief Patrik Hammarén (€365,480), Chief People Officer Kristen Pressner (€519,993) and Chief Geopolitical & Government Relations Officer Mikko Hautala (€55,689) — the last two buying at €7.84 on July 29, days after the Q2 report. Mid-rally, CEO Justin Hotard added €772,102 (Apr 28) - though under Nokia's co-investment long-term incentive arrangement, so not a purely discretionary open-market buy. Nearer the peak, in late May with the shares around €13, Konstanty Owczarek bought around €430,885 and €514,099 (May 22 and 26), and Victoria Hanrahan around €622,595. The only own-account sellers were ahead of the run: Raghav Sahgal (>€1m, Mar 10) and board member Thomas Dannenfeldt (€234,312, Mar 19). Read together, discretionary insiders have on balance been adding — the chair most visibly, on the way down.

A notable insider sale at Puuilo has drawn attention just as the discount retailer accelerates its expansion plans.

Board Member Markku Tuomaala sold 400,000 Puuilo shares on June 11 at a volume-weighted average price of €15.47 per share, according to a managers' transactions filing. The transaction was worth around €6.2 million.

The sale carries particular weight because Tuomaala is not a typical board member. He founded Puuilo and served as CEO from 1995 to 2017, overseeing the company's transformation from a local discount retailer into a national chain. He returned to the board in 2025 and remains closely associated with the company's long-term development.

The transaction came one day after Puuilo reported strong first quarter results. Net sales increased 16% year on year to €103.8 million, while adjusted EBITA rose 50% to €16.3 million. The company reiterated its full-year guidance and continues to target the opening of its first Swedish store within 15 months.

A senior Nokia executive has increased his exposure to the Finnish telecom equipment maker through two share purchases worth a combined roughly $1.1 million, marking the company’s largest insider purchase disclosed so far this year.

Konstanty Owczarek, Nokia’s chief corporate development officer, acquired 32,595 shares on May 22 at an average price of $15.35 on the New York Stock Exchange, a transaction worth about $500,000. Four days later, he purchased another 37,405 shares at $15.99 per share, worth nearly $598,000. The two transactions amount to 70,000 shares bought in less than a week.

The purchases stand out not only for their size, but also because large-scale insider buying remains relatively uncommon among large European technology companies outside compensation-related programs. Nokia’s only larger manager transaction this year moved in the opposite direction. In March, Chief Customer Officer Raghav Sahgal disclosed a €1 million share disposal after selling 150,000 shares at an average price of €6.71 each.

Etteplan Board Chair Robert Ingman has made the company’s largest managerial share purchase in more than a year shortly after the engineering services group reported weakening profitability and a falling share price.

Two managers’ transactions published on May 11 show Ingman buying a combined 55,000 Etteplan shares on May 8 at €7.19 per share.

The larger purchase came through closely associated entity Ingman Group Oy Ab, which acquired 50,000 shares worth roughly €359,500. Ingman also directly purchased 5,000 shares worth about €36,000. Combined, the transactions totaled around €395,000.

The insider purchases suggest Ingman is willing to increase exposure while sentiment around the stock remains weak. At roughly €395,000, the May purchases are the company’s largest insider acquisition since February 2025, when Ingman Group Oy Ab acquired 90,000 shares at €10.625 per share in a transaction worth roughly €956,000.

The purchases substantially increase Ingman’s direct disclosed ownership in Etteplan. Management ownership data dated April 30 showed Robert Ingman holding 65,000 shares, equivalent to 0.26 percent of shares and votes, only second to CEO Juha Näkki.

Buying into weakness

The timing is notable. Etteplan shares are down roughly 16 percent year to date and traded at €7.80 this afternoon, close to the company’s 52-week low of €7.02.

One day before Ingman poured into the shares, Etteplan reported that its first-quarter revenue fell 4.6 percent year over year to €90.5 million, while EBITA declined 36.1 percent to €3.7 million. EBIT margin slipped to 2.4 percent from 4.4 percent a year earlier.

CEO Juha Näkki described market conditions as “very difficult,” citing geopolitical tensions, delayed customer decisions, and postponed industrial projects across most customer industries outside defense and energy.

Despite the slowdown, Etteplan continued investing in AI-related services. The company said the share of revenue derived from AI driven solutions rose to 6 percent in the quarter, up from 2 percent a year earlier.

Etteplan maintained its 2026 revenue guidance of €360 million to €380 million but narrowed its EBIT guidance to €19 million to €23 million, from the previous €19 million to €25 million range.