CEO Comments:
While 2021 was yet another year defined by the pandemic, the mass vaccination programme begun early in the year led to simmering optimism. Strong stock market performance persisted, resulting in higher trading volume. There was also keen interest in taking companies to the market and investing in new companies, both listed and unlisted. Close cooperation among all Carnegie business units ensured that we could offer our private clients unique investment opportunities in high-growth unlisted companies, a contributing factor in the strong growth in our private client segment.
Carnegie participated in a total of 111 transactions, whereof 51 IPOs. That contributed to the number of companies covered by Carnegie’s research department rose to 400; Carnegie now has the widest independent research coverage in the Nordics. The strong ecosystem that Carnegie has built through its focused and goal-oriented approach over the years has proven to be a successful strategy. Clients benefit from close cooperation among the business areas and Carnegie advisory is consequently highly sought after in the market.
Client trust in Carnegie as an adviser remains strong and all business areas persistently top the rankings in independent client surveys. Although high market activity required periods of intense work by the staff, Carnegie was able to allocate time for rest and recovery. It is also gratifying that Carnegie once again improved its employee survey score: 96 percent (+1 percent) of employees say they are engaged in their work. That our employees are happy and engaged in their work is essential to our continued success and, not least importantly, to ensuring that they are joined by other outstanding talents who choose Carnegie as an employer.
Carnegie has been working with an IT transformation in recent years aimed at modernising our infrastructure. A major system switch was carried out in October, which impacted certain app features and we have focused on dealing with this issue since then. The modern IT architecture we have now acquired gives us strong potential to further develop functionality and the offering and continue streamlining the business.
Carnegie partnered with Svenska Dagbladet Näringsliv for the eighth straight year to crown the Entrepreneur of Tomorrow. There was keen interest from the public and voting broke all previous records. The winner was Irriot, a company that develops smart irrigation systems. In everything we do, our focus is always on clients of Carnegie.
Client trust combined with employee engagement are critical to Carnegie’s strong profit trend. Profit this year exceeded performance in 2020, itself a record year. Regardless of what happens in the financial markets in the future, Carnegie’s mix of client focus and employee engagement is unshakable.
Björn Jansson, CEO Carnegie