Is There An Online Future For Old Media?
The two big Finnish “old media” companies, Sanoma and Alma Media, published their 2009 results yesterday and today, respectively. However, as seems to be the common policy, neither of them was too open about the state of their online business. But luckily Alma still offered some nuggets of information for constructing a picture of what’s going on.
The two online legs of an old media company are typically classifieds and editorially driven news sites. Alma’s classifieds segment, which includes such assets as the housing site Etuovi.com and jobs site Monster.fi, posted a loss of €0.7m with an €27m revenue. Sanoma doesn’t give out any information on its online classifieds.
On the online news side, Alma publishes Iltalehti.fi, the biggest website in Finland by unique visitors. Although the full year figures for the asset were not disclosed today, the Q1/09 report from April states a revenue of €1.2m, so the annual income is likely to be around the €5m mark. Given that Iltalehti.fi relies mainly on journalistic content, the site is – after full allocation of editorial costs – most likely loss-making or, if they’re lucky, posting a very small profit.
Growth Companies Largest Employers In The Finnish Economy
Kauppalehti reports on some fascinating results from research conducted by Balance Consulting on the effects of growth companies in the Finnish economy. While I realise this data is very Finland centric and might not be of that much interest to others - I am sure these results will resonate in similar manner in other countries. We wrote about this in 2008 as well and it seems that the data, some one and a half years later is still very valid. The study was conducted by looking at companies whose revenue is above 1,7 million euros annually and belong to the Balance Consulting corporate databse. While the database is very thorough, it does leave a lot of the younger startups out.
Fruugo's Presentation From SIME
Taneli Tikka posted a video of Fruugo "launch" last week in SIME (there wasn't any product launch as such, most things mentioned where the same as we reported before the event).
The video shows Fruugo's VP marketing Janne Waltonen giving a presentation and then answering a few interview questions.
Fruugo talk in SIME by Taneli for http://tane.li from Taneli Tikka on Vimeo.
Fruugo will be present today at digital marketing seminar DiVia in Helsinki, and might tell a bit more, although they'll still not show their actual product.
The Finnish business newspaper Kauppalehti released an article last Friday, stating that Fruugo has "forgotten" (as commented by Fruugo) to leave their financial statement to Trade Register at the end of August as required, but has just posted them a statement of losing the company's share capital. That doesn't necessarily mean the company wouldn't have cash or other liquid assets to run their operations, though, but looks like they're most likely looking for more money. Also, the previous CEO Reijo Syrjäläinen has left and Fruugo is now run by the company's operational director Juha Usva.
New entrants top Deloitte's Finnish Technology Fast 50 2007
Open Source service company Nomovok is the number one in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list of 2007. The list ranks firms based on the revenue growth over the past five years (having at least 5 years of operations is thus one of the prerequisites). The revenue growth of Novomok over the past 5 years has been impressively over 2300 %. Only a bit behind comes Bluetooth technology provider Bluegiga Technologies. Third is Openbit, provider of mobile DRM solutions, with 1636 percent growth.
Last year's first Sulake and third Digium have slightly dropped, although still in top 10. The 2006 number two Cidercone was just recently acquired by OMX-listed Ixonos.
Deloitte's Tuomo Salmi, partner, Services, describes that according to the accompanying qualitative study the most critical factors affecting success have been concentrating on the core business, committing the personnel, and leadership-related factors, as seen by the management of the companies. Having and being able to keep skillful and entrepreneur-minded people was deemed even more important than customer accounts.
Deloitte Technology Fast 50 competition in Finland is arranged in cooperation with Kauppalehti, The Finnish Venture Capital Association, The Finnish Software Entrepreneurs Association, and Tekes. Top companies will automatically participate in EMEA Fast 500 competition. Last year Sulake positioned 12th in the EMEA Fast list with 8095 % growth, while Cidercone was 65th with growth of 2086 %.
This might implicate that this year's top Finnish growth companies may not position anywhere in top 50 in EMEA. More arrogant and audacious growth entrepreneurs needed?
