Chair of the Board Ville Voipio and President and CEO Kai Öistämö

Chair and CEO's review 2024

Leading the way in climate action and innovation

In 2024, the world continued to face complex challenges, with increasing geopolitical tensions and uncertainty in the business environment. Regardless of the market challenges, we showed resilience with good growth in our Weather and Environment business and a strong position in Industrial Measurements.

It is our responsibility to be a technology leader

Alongside the critical concerns globally, the fight against climate change remains one of the most pressing challenges requiring urgent attention. With 2024 marking the warmest year on record, our renewed purpose of Taking every measure for the planet is more important than ever.  

At Vaisala, we see it as our responsibility towards our stakeholders – shareholders, customers, colleagues, and the planet alike – to be a technology leader enabling climate action. Vaisala is dedicated to providing measurement instruments and insights for understanding, mitigating, and adapting to climate change, turning data into decisions, and decisions into meaningful action for our planet.

In 2024, our global team continued executing our strategic priorities. In Weather and Environment, we built upon our global leadership in weather systems through important customer deals to deliver weather radars to the State Meteorological Agency of Spain and a project to modernize 14 airports in Indonesia. We acquired Speedwell Climate and Maxar’s WeatherDesk to build Vaisala Xweather’s position as a weather intelligence partner for insurance and finance customers, as well as Nevis Technology to expand our offering in the offshore wind market. In Industrial Measurements, we launched several new products and were able to resiliently hold our position globally despite the challenging market.

In 2024, we continued our focus on research and development as a key part of our technology leadership, with R&D investments amounting to 12% of net sales. We shifted our R&D focus towards new technologies and products. Moreover, we continuously develop our operations, embracing digitalization and AI as tools to simplify and scale for added customer experience, quality, and profitability. In 2024, we also started building a new automated logistics center in Vantaa, Finland. With state-of-the-art automation technology, the facility will centralize all our various logistics functions currently dispersed across our Vantaa campus into one centralized location in Finland, ensuring fast deliveries to customers around the world.

None of this work would be possible without our professional and dedicated global team of diverse perspectives and backgrounds. To ensure our position as a preferred employer, we actively track employee engagement. Our annual Voice of People survey shows continuous strong results across indices, with 84% (2023: 85%) of our employees being proud to work for Vaisala and an Employee Net Promoter Score of 28 (29). We are grateful for the engagement and dedication and are committed to improving our employee development and well-being further.

Towards the end of the year, we also announced changes in the Vaisala Leadership Team. As of January 2025, Samuli Hänninen joined the Vaisala Leadership Team and continues to lead the Xweather business, Anne Jalkala started leading the Weather, Energy and Environment business and Jarkko Sairanen the Industrial Measurements business area. Lorenzo Gulli joined the company to lead strategy and M&A, and Sampsa Lahtinen retired after a very successful decade at Vaisala, more than tripling the Industrial Measurements business in size. Our warmest thank you to Sampsa! We look forward to working together with the new Leadership Team.  

Commitment across the entire value chain

Our commitment to the planet covers the sustainability of our solutions, operations, and the entire value chain worldwide. We have integrated the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) both into our strategic planning and the development of new products for climate action. We continue our commitment to the UN Global Compact initiative and its 10 principles regarding human rights, labor standards, environment, and anti-corruption.

In terms of our carbon footprint, our main opportunity is to decrease indirect scope 3 emissions, which represent over 99% of Vaisala’s total emissions. In 2023, we set science-based targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The targets were approved by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) in April 2024. During the year, we have started several actions to further reduce our emissions, such as introducing developments in R&D by making carbon footprint evaluation part of every new product design and shifting from air to road transport in European distribution. We also received a gold medal by EcoVadis, reflecting our commitment to sustainability throughout our supply chain.  

Among the best in the world for sustainable growth

In 2024, one of our highlights was the recognition by TIME Magazine as one of the world’s best companies for sustainable growth. Based on revenue growth, financial stability, and taking care of the environment, Vaisala took the 38th place in the first edition of World’s Best Companies – Sustainable Growth ranking by TIME Magazine and Statista. For us, caring for the climate and driving sustainable growth go hand in hand, and it is a true honor to be recognized by TIME for precisely this combination.

Taking every measure – together  

Whereas the TIME recognition focused on financial metrics and environmental footprint, we recognize that our true impact on the planet comes through the work with and for our customers. We are grateful for the great collaboration with our stakeholders, from customers and shareholders to partners and colleagues, and look forward to continuing our work for the planet in the years and decades to come.

Ville Voipio
Chair of the Board

Kai Öistämö
President and CEO

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