Suunto is preparing to gut its Finnish workforce. Helsingin Sanomat reported Thursday that the company has opened change negotiations covering its entire staff in Finland except senior management, with 118 of roughly 160 jobs potentially ending.
That is nearly three quarters of everyone Suunto employs in the country it has called home since 1936.
The notice went to employees on Monday, according to Iltalehti. It states that Suunto's Chinese owner Liesheng plans to move the company's Finnish operations mainly to China and to other European countries.
Suunto's management had not responded to Helsingin Sanomat's requests for comment by Thursday afternoon. Yle, Ilta-Sanomat, Iltalehti, Savon Sanomat and the English-language Daily Northern all carried the story within hours, all tracing back to the same Helsingin Sanomat report.
What change negotiations actually mean
Finland's co-determination process is not a layoff notice. It is the formal negotiation employers must run before cutting jobs, and it sets the number, the timetable and the selection criteria.
So the 118 figure is a ceiling, not a confirmed body count. Talks can end with fewer cuts, or with staff moved into different roles. What the scope tells you is the intent: if the talks cover everyone but the executive team, no function in Finland is being protected.
For context on how fast this has gone, Talouselama's count puts Suunto's headcount at about 320 in 2022 and 214 in 2025. The company's own filed accounts show average headcount falling from 276 to 214 during 2025 alone, with turnover rising 27 percent to 106.5 million euros over the same period.
That is the uncomfortable shape of this story. Suunto's sales have been growing. The workforce has been shrinking anyway.
This is the third act, not the first
The move away from Finnish manufacturing is not new, and the timeline matters more than the headline.
- May 2022: Amer Sports sells Suunto to Liesheng, the Chinese group behind products like the Amazfit and Zepp lines. Suunto's own announcement at the time said Liesheng intended to keep running operations from Vantaa.
- June 2024: Suunto cuts 76 roles out of roughly 300 staff.
- September 2024: Suunto confirms that all of its sports watches, including the Vertical, the 9 Peak Pro and the Race S, would be produced exclusively in China from that month.
- 2025: Suunto's sustainability reporting puts the Vantaa factory and office at 42 percent of total production, down from 63 percent a year earlier.
- November 2026: Change negotiations open on 118 of about 160 Finland jobs.
Suunto confirmed the September 2024 production shift directly, in a statement posted in its own community forum: from that point, sports watches would be made exclusively in China. The Vantaa site kept the Ocean dive computer line, instruments, and design and quality work.
The 42 percent figure is worth reading carefully. It reflects total production across watches, dive computers and instruments, and the Finnish site runs on renewable energy, which is why Suunto still leads with it. It does not mean 42 percent of Suunto watches are assembled in Finland, because they are not.
What "Finnish" is worth
Suunto's brand has always leaned on place. The company page still opens with Tuomas Vohlonen, a Finnish orienteer, and 1936, and the liquid-filled compass he built in a Helsinki workshop. Nordic design, Finnish factory, Arctic testing. That story sells watches in exactly the markets where Suunto is strongest.
Garmin is American. COROS is Chinese-founded. Polar is Finnish, and Polar is smaller and in worse financial shape, with losses widening to 11 million euros in its last filed accounts. Suunto was the one that could claim both outdoor credibility and European manufacturing at scale.
Strip out three quarters of the Finnish staff and the claim gets thinner. It does not disappear, because the headquarters, the brand and some production stay. But "designed and built in Finland" becomes a much narrower statement than it was in 2023.
Worth saying plainly: none of this makes the watches worse. The Race 3 and Race 3S are genuinely good devices, and moving work to China can shorten development cycles and cut costs. Buyers who care about where a product is made will have to read the label rather than the marketing, though, and that is a real change for a brand that sold the label.
If you are in the market anyway, the Suunto Race 3S and the Suunto Vertical are the two models most of this conversation is really about, and both are still sold and supported from Vantaa today.
The part that should worry Suunto owners
Job cuts at the Finnish end are a support and software question as much as a manufacturing one.
Everything that makes a Suunto watch useful after you buy it runs through the people who build the app, the firmware and the service operation. Suunto's software has had a rough stretch, and the company has already been leaning on cost cuts in R&D, down about a third in the last set of accounts.
If the 118 figure holds, the functions that survive in Finland will be a skeleton: brand, some commercial staff, and whatever the owner decides is worth keeping close. Whether service quality follows is the thing to watch over the next year, not the assembly line.
There is also a straightforward ownership story here. Liesheng bought a European heritage brand with a manufacturing base and has spent four years moving the work to where its supply chain already is. That is what an owner does when it buys for the name and the customer list rather than the factory. It also explains why the product pipeline keeps widening into screenless bands and other form factors that suit a Chinese manufacturing base better than a small Vantaa line.
Bottom line
Suunto is not winding down. Revenue is up, the product line is the strongest it has been in years, and the brand is still based in Vantaa.
But the company that told its employees in 2022 that operations would stay in Finland has now opened talks to end most of those jobs, four years and two rounds of cuts later. If the plan goes through, Suunto becomes a Finnish brand with a Chinese supply chain and a small Finnish office, which is a different company from the one that has been selling watches out of Vantaa for nearly 90 years.
For anyone holding a Suunto or thinking about buying one, the practical questions are whether support and software staffing survive the cuts, and how much of the brand's Finnish identity you are still paying for. The watches will keep shipping. The story behind them is what changed.
Sources: Helsingin Sanomat, Yle, Iltalehti, Daily Northern, Suunto sustainability page, Suunto community forum statement.
