CountQuest Interactive

The Data & Insights business area was launched in March when the Stockholm based CountQuest Interactive AB was acquired. The company is specialized in implementing and maintaining data-driven business decision solutions for the digital activities of global enterprises. It has a unique position as the only certified premium Adobe Analytics business partner in the Nordics.

As digitalization efforts increase exponentially within large corporations, the need for data acquisition and analysis are growing rapidly. CountQuest provides a managed services solution for helping global companies in this. The services complement other areas within Nordic Morning which use obtained data for improving communication and digital services.

2016 was a great year for CountQuest. The revenues grew by 35 percent and the operating profit by 50 percent in comparison to the previous year. Several new customers were acquired, of which an increasing number by Nordic Morning’s joint sales activities.

The peak of the year was in December when the company was given the Di Gasell award for exceptional long-term profitable growth - an achievement attained by less than one percent of the Swedish companies.

2017

The focus will be in growing the business area profitably and in providing exceptional service to its customers. CountQuest will continue to expand and develop its partnerships with Adobe and Tealium, and integrate more into the Nordic Morning offering. For securing the future growth, the company will have a strong focus on talent nurturing and acquisition.

The Visibility & Service Design business area drives digital transformation within the areas of service design, marketing technology, analytics and media optimization through the brands Ottoboni and Klikki in Sweden and Finland.

Together with other spearhead competencies within Nordic Morning, such as Data & Insights and Content, an attractive broad scope of services is provided to lead the digital transformation of the largest enterprises and advertisers in the Nordics.

During 2016, there was a dramatic increase in understanding among large corporations regarding how technology solutions enable cheaper, better and faster marketing and communication.

Klikki

Klikki Group strengthened its position as a leading service provider in the implementation and management of advertising and marketing technology solutions in the Nordics. The company is a Google Premium Partner and has led the execution of several high-profile assignments utilizing Google’s DoubleClick and Google 360 platforms.

The increased demand for these solutions, combined with Klikki’s other core services such as search engine optimization, led to significant, profitable growth. Revenue increased by 73 percent and EBIT by 53 percent compared with the previous year.

Ottoboni

For Ottoboni Sweden, a digital agency acquired in 2015, this was a year of change. The company’s business model and offering were developed to provide more strategic and user-centric services, as well as to work in a more agile way and closer to customers. The company’s organizational structure and management team were also changed.

In Malmö, Ottoboni grew significantly by acquiring a number of new customers and by recruiting some high-profile talents. The office in Gothenburg was restructured and merged with the office of sister company Sitrus.

The restructuring of Ottoboni Sweden led to a significant write-down of goodwill items, which weakened the result of the entire Visibility & Service Design business area.

Ottoboni Finland was launched in September 2015, and the company had a great year in 2016: it succeeded in taking a clear market position as well as in building the team and client portfolio with several high-profile, strategic consulting assignments for digitization and service design. The company’s revenue grew by 42 percent compared with 2015.

2017

The market for digital transformation services, including strategic consulting, service design and development as well as the implementation and management of advertising and marketing technology, is expected to grow significantly.

Both Klikki and Ottoboni are well positioned in the growing market, and they are expected to grow profitably. At the beginning of the year, Nordic Morning companies in Stockholm and Malmö moved together under one roof to strengthen their collaboration for an increasing number of joint customers.

The main business challenges and risks for both Klikki and Ottoboni are related to talent acquisition and retention. These are of crucial importance to meet the increasing demand in the market.

Edita Publishing

Edita Publishing provides information and learning services and products to customers in Finland. An expert in content curation, the company provides Finland’s most extensive legal information services, and is a partner in the distribution of official information. Edita Publishing is a major publisher of learning materials and a development partner for the education sector. The company also provides customer-specific publishing and content solutions to the private, public and third sectors.

Our customers are organizations and individuals that need meaningful, reliable and up-to-date information or knowledge. There is a wealth of information available, but filtering it down to meaningful information is challenging. Edita Publishing creates solutions to meet this need. These solutions are used by various professional groups, such as lawyers, tax advisors, managers, consultants and educators.

Edita Publishing has several sub brands: Edilex is the market leader for legal information services; Credita provides structured information on public procurement; Edilex Pro provides learning services for professionals; and Educode contributes to the development of the educational sector. Our customer-specific content services provide more in-depth solutions than normal websites, based on services such as digital archives. An example of our significant content production and maintenance service is Finlex, the public legal information service.

At the beginning of 2016, Edita Publishing sold its customer magazine business to its sister company Sitrus in order to focus on information and learning services and content curation. The year was successful in terms of strengthening and creating new partnerships.

In February, it was the 15th anniversary of our leading legal information service Edilex. In March, the service prototype Semantic Finlex (Finnish Law and Justice in Semantic Web) was launched together by the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance and Aalto University. In December, the new HSEQ legal information service was launched for specialists working in the fields of health, safety, environment and quality.

Educode is responsible for the New Pedagogies for Deep Learning training for the Finnish education sector. Event collaboration has been done with, for example, Microsoft. In late 2016, a partnership with Lego Education was launched to provide certified training for programming and robotics. Edita Publishing has also been a strategic partner to EduCloud Alliance, which aims to build standards for learning technology and content.

Edita Publishing provided several customer-specific learning and content solutions. Digital learning and interactive content solutions projects were conducted together with customers. The amount of interactive learning solutions increased, and the production of various digital content solutions and printed books remained at the same level as in the previous year.

The Learning Materials business area was successful. The Secondary and Upper-Secondary School business area grew by 23 per cent. However, updating the content and technology has been challenging due to a curriculum change in Finland. The digital book concept was developed further.

2017

Edita Publishing will continue to develop digital publishing and learning solutions, and produce new information services for the legal and professional sectors. Partnership programs will continue. We will also be prepared for the reform of vocational learning in 2018. We will continue updating our background systems and processes as well as preparing to relocate together with Nordic Morning sister companies.

Mods Graphic Studio

Established in 2000, Mods Graphic Studio is the image expert within the Nordic Morning Group. Working within the areas of image retouch, prepress and automation, Mods deals with a variety of production tasks, solving technical requirements to fulfill its clients’ specific needs.

In order for its customers to receive the maximum benefit, Mods aspires to be one step ahead of developments within the industry, and its main focus at this time is on automation and e-commerce images.

In 2016, Mods succeeded in keeping up with the growth of its biggest customers, whose technical demands on the agency to process an increasing volume of images with automation grew, as did the requirements for more specific solutions for each marketing campaign and for different marketing channels.

Mods involved its customers in each step of the production journey as well as in its thoughts for the future, regarding how to solve new ways of approaching advanced retouch and e-commerce production.

2017

The emphasis for this year is for Mods to be a part of its biggest customers’ changes and to adopt to the new requirements of modern image management.

One important factor in this respect will be the need to handle and keep track of a growing number of images for an increasing amount of marketing channels. Services will need to be developed to deal with the larger amount of images to process.

This development is likely to lead to more collaboration with sister companies within the Nordic Morning Group, as the need to take on their various skills increases.

The business area focuses on automated 1:1 marketing and improving the efficiency of marketing measures. Edita Prima Oy in Finland specializes in print automation and print management. Edita Bobergs AB focuses on direct mail and printed loyalty programs in the Swedish market. Seed Digital Media Oy in Finland specializes in data-driven loyalty marketing and marketing automation.

Edita Prima

A fast technology change has put a tremendous pressure on the traditional print industry. However, despite of a challenging business transformation, this was a successful year for Edita Prima. Significant growth was reached through print automation and web-to-print solutions – services that Edita Prima has been consistently developing. Nevertheless, the growth of the new services did not fully compensate the declining revenue from other segments. Compared with previous years, however, the decline in the print turnover was remarkably smaller. Despite of a slight decline in turnover Edita Prima´s operative profitability improved well from previous year exceeding the set targets. At year end, Edita Prima carried out restructuring measures in the declining part of the print production. The costs were booked as non-operative costs.

Seed Digital Media

Seed Digital Media grew its business with a good number of customer acquisitions. Seed has good experience of both understanding consumer behavior and of leveraging marketing automation, which resulted in a 20 percent growth in revenue. Active collaboration with sister companies within Nordic Morning brought good results. A growing proportion of customer assignments were solved by joint efforts, and the number of Nordic level customers increased. Seed developed expertise in marketing technology by partnering with the leading tech platforms, enabling data-driven workflows.

A major effort to improve internal collaboration was taken in spring 2016. Several Finnish companies – Seed, Edita Prima, Ottoboni Finland, Klikkicom and the Finnish Sitrus Agency – moved under the same roof in Helsinki. This resulted in numerous co-sales projects and an increase in joint assignments, where solutions were reached through adopting a cross-functional approach.

Edita Bobergs

Edita Bobergs’ year started with major restructuring measures. Sheet offset operations were divested in March. Simultaneously, Veddesta-based operations were reorganized. Production facilities were relocated to Falun, and sales and customer service were placed in Stockholm. Although the second half of the year was successful, the restructuring costs weakened the result in comparison with the previous year. Edita Bobergs focuses on direct mail and continuous personalized mailings. During the fall, the company closed significant customer assignments and the operative profitability improved remarkably.

2017

Loyalty marketing, permission marketing, 1:1 marketing – in fact, almost all forms of marketing – are rapidly changing toward an extremely technology-driven ecosystem. Seed will continue to develop its capabilities in state-of-the-art marketing automation. By harnessing effective collaboration within Nordic Morning, we are able to meet the high expectations of our customers.

Print companies Edita Prima and Edita Bobergs are looking for further growth through automation and online services. There is a growing demand to include print as a seamless part of customers’ marketing engine. Although the overall print market will continue to decline, the remaining part will be executed with new technology, platforms and automation. We will focus on changing the entire process of how personalized print is being purchased, created and produced. After several years of downsizing, we estimate a more stable development in 2017.