Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO after over half a decade; Pekka Lundmark, outgoing President and CEO of energy firm Fortum appointed as President and CEO
Rajeev Suri, the chief executive of Nokia, is stepping down from his leadership role after overseeing the Finnish networking giant for more than 10 years.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nokia's corner-office churn has been running for years: the company lost its Technologies chief Ramzi Haidamus in 2016 and then reached outside telecom to hire Samsung's North America CEO to run that consumer-focused division in 2017. Rajeev Suri's exit now takes out the last long-tenured layer of that leadership structure, after more than a decade at the top of the Finnish networking group.
The replacement is a deliberate cross-sector pick: Pekka Lundmark arrives from running Fortum, Finland's energy major, making this the second recent Finnish CEO handover where a domestic blue-chip reached outside its own industry — echoing Rovio's internal promotion of Kati Levoranta in a smaller-key version of the same talent circulation.
First-order effects
- Fortum immediately loses its sitting President and CEO and must run a successor search while Nokia installs an outsider with no networking-operator background at the helm.
- Suri's departure ends a decade-plus run in which he steered Nokia from its post-handset restructuring into pure network infrastructure, handing his successor a company whose recent leadership bets — Haidamus out, a Samsung executive in — already signaled openness to external hires.
Second-order effects
- Nokia's board is effectively wagering that energy-industry management experience transfers to network infrastructure, putting pressure on rival networking vendors to justify whether their own CEOs' telecom pedigrees are an asset or a liability in the same markets.
- The move tightens the Finnish executive talent loop: a sitting CEO moving directly between two of the country's flagship listed companies signals that Nordic boards treat sector boundaries as permeable, which raises the price of retaining proven chiefs across Fortum's energy peers and Nokia's tech peers alike.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large Nordic corporates will increasingly source CEOs across industries rather than promote within them, eroding the assumption that infrastructure and network companies require lifer operators — and making cross-industry track records, not domain tenure, the currency of top-suite mobility.
- A decade-long CEO era ending at Nokia also marks the generational turnover of the executives who managed the company's post-mobile transition, with the next leadership cohort inheriting a portfolio defined by infrastructure and IP rather than consumer devices.
The trend: Finnish and Nordic boards are increasingly circulating chief executives across industries — energy, gaming, consumer tech, network infrastructure — treating cross-sector management records as a substitute for domain tenure.