News

Author: Anne Årneby / CEO of Nordic Morning Group
Date: 2021-04-29

Result 2020 - An extraordinary year for Nordic Morning Group

2020 – an extraordinary year with a focus on employee safety, mitigating demand changes of our services and ensuring continued good collaboration.

Nordic Morning Group’s transformational journey has been ongoing since January 2017, and with that the constant improvements to our offerings and processes, investments in building our culture and ways of working, and identifying innovations for efficiency.

The coronavirus pandemic made 2020 extraordinary in many ways, with a lot of focus put on employee wellbeing and safety procedures at our offices. Most of our employees, except for those assigned to production, have been working remotely since mid-March. The shift to working from home was implemented successfully more or less overnight, which shows great flexibility and adaptation from everyone involved.

Supporting our managers and personnel in coping with this new situation has been crucial, both throughout 2020 and beyond. Visible leadership and frequent communication have formed the basis for the good collaboration throughout the organization. Our managers have been given the tools and support to lead our staff and remote teams.

Despite these tough times, we see that the investments and persistent efforts in developing the company culture are paying off. The crisis has strengthened the identity of Nordic Morning Group and brought us closer together. We are clearly moving in the right direction when it comes to strengthening our desired culture and behavior, with an impressive leap in the progress of self-leadership. This has been confirmed by the results in our annual employee surveys.

The pandemic has caused changes to the demand for our services, especially in the Nordic Morning business area. In 2020, we reorganized and downsized our operations in Nordic Morning, and we furloughed some employees during this time. The internal focus has been on further refining our organizational setup in order to better position the business for profitable growth.

The Edita Prima and Edita Publishing business areas performed well, despite a highly challenging economic environment in general. Edita Prima succeeded in growing its market share, especially in the areas of transactional printing and major new and long-term client contracts. For Edita Publishing, the potential negative effects of the pandemic on business were mainly avoided by successfully turning some products and services into digital solutions and terminating unprofitable ones. As a result, its profitability improved from 2019.

In 2020, organizations and society in general were forced to take a giant leap in their digital transformation. As a result of this scenario and the prevailing positive economic outlook, organizations and the public sector are looking for partners to challenge established ways of working and to help them accelerate their transformation. This brings us opportunities to build relationships with new clients, as well as to grow our business with existing customers.

In 2021, we expect our clients’ business to recover in line with the economy, but the pace of recovery will vary between industries. Since we have diversified client portfolios across our three business areas, we are in a good position to be able to balance variations over time.

Read more about our year 2020 from our annual report website.

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