Comparison of countries - Finland, Sweden and Denmark
As I was looking at through the companies presenting tonight at the ArcticEvening Copenhagen (it's going to be a very good event by the way!), I noticed that almost, if not all of them are business-to-business companies. This is an interesting trend in my opinion as Finland and Sweden are in my opinion more oriented towards the consumer market.
Finland, which I know best, is very oriented towards the consumer market in terms of internet oriented startups. We have our share of b2b startups as well and if we go back a bit we can remember that SteelTeam acquired Christoffer Landtman's CompanyCube operating in the steel industry. Then again we need to remember that Jaiku was acquired by Google so there are acquisitions on both fronts. Unfortunately there aren't many more cases that could be given as examples.
Interview with Christoffer Landtman
Shot during our event last Thursday. Congrats to CompanyCube!
SteelTeam acquires CompanyCube
We wrote about CompanyCube back in March, when they were doing business as normal. I checked my e-mail this morning to find a press release from Christoffer Landtman, the CEO of CompanyCube, to announce that they have been acquired by SteelTeam, a steel trading company. CompanyCube will become a subsidiary of SteelTeam in June.
With the acquisition CompanyCube has halted marketing and selling of their CRM and trading solutions. They continue to develop their steel trading solutions, but look for strategic partners to address other industry segments such as plastics, oil industry, wood, paper and the financial industry.
Christoffer and Jussi Alamäki, the current management team will move towards new challenges.
Congratulations from the whole Arctic Startup team to Christoffer and Jussi, a magnificent job!
CompanyCube - more efficient steel trading
I met Christoffer Landtman the CEO of CompanyCube in our Open Coffee with Arctic Startup event. CompanyCube has a very interesting position in terms of their business. They have managed to penetrate the somewhat unsexy commodities market of traders with their product. More specifically, they offer steel traders a viable solution to handle their processes.
The service is provided over the internet, accessible from anywhere - even the mobile phone they claim. The service includes trading management, customer relations management and business intelligence. Trading activities are managed as seperate projects and each project therefore includes certain routines such as stakeholder management, scheduling and so on. CRM is the regular integration of customer data to match more closely to the trading activities. Business intelligence has been built in to give a quick dashboard type of display to running your business and help make decisions faster.
CompanyCube is positioning themselves in huge market, measured to be 318 billion USD in 2005 worldwide. Due to large acquisitions and mergers the IT solutions are a mess and largely fragmented, according Christoffer Landtman. They have started off well in Finland as SteelTeam, the largest trading house of steel has began to use their product to streamline their business.
