Fennobiz Sales and Marketing Services

Services to hi-tech companies for entering the German, Austrian and Swiss (DACH) ICT markets

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Getting 2021 going

17/01/2021 By Fennobiz

Welcome to the new year! While you are sipping your coffee or tea, here some updates for you on what is going on in the Swiss ICT business. We are now already at the beginning of the 3rd week in the new year… how did that happen?

As Covid-19 is a key topic everywhere, let’s start with that: the infection numbers in Switzerland have been very high for several months and the good news is that slowly but surely they are improving now. At the peak level in November there were well over 10.000 new infections in a day (!) and the latest day figure announced by the health authorities on Friday, January 15th was 2.396, the seven-day average having come down by 21% from the previous week.

The impact of the pandemic on the Swiss ICT business has not really differed much from that elsewhere. A recent study from August to October 2020 by the market and social research institute gfs-zürich showed that in two thirds of the surveyed 503 companies with 4 to 49 employees work could be moved to home offices without major issues.

The Swiss federal government has just announced significant new measures to protect the people against the upcoming third wave, which is expected to be accelerating the infection rates due to the new virus variant. From Monday the 18th of January the restaurants, museums, zoos and shops that do not sell only products for the daily use will be closed until the end of February. Sports events cannot be organised with spectators. It is now also required for people to work from home, if at all possible.

European media commented earlier that Switzerland is not closing its ski resorts, although some neighbouring countries requested that. Actually the decisions are made in the cantons, not on federal level and not all the ski resorts in Switzerland are open now. Well, skiing now seems to be possible in Austria, too.

Not that there would not be enough snow! A LOT of snow has covered the country – in canton Zurich we got some 30 – 40 cm of new snow and in the Alps the figure was closer to two metres in the last few days. This came down basically in two days of snowing and of course caused some major problems for traffic. In canton Zurich about 2.500 calls for help were made to the local authorities, often concerning fallen trees blocking roads.

e-ID vote coming up

There is going to be a very interesting national vote taking place on March the 7th: the Swiss will be deciding whether they want to accept the e-ID law proposed by the Swiss federal government or not. The idea is to make it simpler and more safe to identify oneself on the internet.

It is very common that there is resistance in Switzerland for such proposals and then a referendum is organised, often also with an alternative proposal to be voted on. This time this is not the case and if the Swiss folk vote no, it will take again several years to get a new proposal on the table without any solution to be used in the meantime.

What exactly the e-ID will look like, is not defined in the law. It will be used for identification in public and private online services. Obtaining the e-ID is voluntary for individuals and therefore online service providers will have to allow identification with other methods, too.

The creation of an e-ID has been in the works for some twenty years in Switzerland and it will be very interesting to see, what will happen in March – it is not completely sure that the law will be approved.

Swiss EPD (Elektronische Patientendossier): first implementation in canton Aargau

At least this is the way it was announced in December. We have read about other pioneering implementations of electronic patient (or “health”) records in at least Basel and in Geneva that have been in use for some time and are being developed further. Nevertheless, this is an important event and the rest of the EPD systems should be implemented during this year in Switzerland. The creation of the EPD systems is the main eHealth initiative and obviously a topic generating much discussion in the Swiss healthcare sector and among the public.

The EPD is a regional or national level database that will contain health information concerning the individuals living in Switzerland – that is, those persons that have decided to register for this system that is entirely voluntary for individual persons. For the hospitals and other healthcare providing organisations it is mandatory. The model has been under development for a long time and now the current version of the Swiss eHealth strategy is pushing the actual implementation in the field – the cantons being in the driver seats.

What does this mean for companies with eHealth-related solutions? You will have to ensure that your solution has an interface to those EPD systems.

In the starting phase the EPD will contain mostly documents – typically in PDF form and it will take some time, before structured patient data from tests will be recorded, according to some comments. How the documents are going to be recorded into the EPD remains open and particularly the private family doctors – of which there are still thousands – are not too keen to start doing that.

As a matter of fact – if you understand German and are interested in this topic, go to the Swiss national TV website www.srf.ch and search for EPD. You will get 4.036 search results, some of the newest ones on the above-mentioned EPD implementation in Aargau. It will give you an idea on how much discussion this matter is generating in Switzerland!

Filed Under: Business, Fennobiz, News

How is the Swiss economy doing?

28/04/2020 By Fennobiz

Just a month and a half ago we wrote about the very good employment figures in 2019 in Switzerland. Like in most countries in Europe, the situation has now changed – but how much?

What is to be expected in a pandemic situation like what we have now, is that the Swiss tourism sector has suffered the most and very quickly, too. This is in line with what has happened in Austria, another country with a normally flourishing tourism sector.

Some 95% of all companies in Switzerland are SMEs (the generally used definition being companies having less than 250 employees) and the federal government has been quick to respond to their immediate cash flow needs with loans guaranteed by the Swiss government. Two-thirds of the employees work for these companies and it is crucial for the economy to maintain the buying power of these people.

In an update released on April 15th 2020 the Swiss federal SME website (www.kmu.admin.ch) referred to a study performed by PwC among the Swiss CFOs. They found that 65% of the participating CFO’s expected their companies to be able to get back to normal after one month or less from the end of the pandemic. In other European countries the majority of CFOs are expecting a time frame of around three months.

So, in general the Swiss CFOs are somewhat less worried than their counterparts in other European countries. However, the majority of the Swiss CFOs are seeing severe consequences for the companies’ activities and the pandemic will lead to reductions in revenues and/or company results. The normal result from this is of course a reduction in costs – especially employment costs. In Switzerland many companies have now made their employees to perform reduced working hours (“Kurzarbeit”). This is a mode that is being controlled by the cantons and rather than explaining here, how it works – if you are interested in the matter you will find a good explanation at the website www.ch.ch.

Another survey made by ETH Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich with more than 20.000 students) during the first half of April among around 2.000 executives in commercial and service companies gave a darker picture of the situation, however it is not seen as bad as in the financial crisis of 2009, except for the services sector, which would – according to the expectations of the responders – be hit harder than back then. This would mean sectors like traffic, information, communications and personal services. You can find more details on this topic in an article published on April 17th 2020 in Handelszeitung (www.handelszeitung.ch, in German).

There are some very good news, too: while exports were declining in most other industry branches, the Swiss chemical-pharmaceutical industry grew in the first quarter of 2020 quite significantly. According to the Swiss Federal Customs Administration figures published on April the 24th 2020 the growth was 2.2% in March and 1% in the quarter. This being a major export industry in Switzerland, this led to the trade balance closing in the first three months with a surplus of 8.3 billion Swiss Francs (approx. 7.85 billion euro).

Overall, the Swiss economy is one of the strongest in the world. The different worst-case scenarios presented at the moment talk about potential future (single-digit) unemployment levels in the kind of range that many even well-off European countries have been living with for many years already. The national debt levels of such countries are already high and the European Union and other bodies will have a hard time tackling the economic situations in these countries.

In this situation we believe Switzerland will remain a very interesting market for European companies, that have something of value to offer to Swiss customers. What will not change is that the Swiss will be looking very carefully at your products and solutions before making long-term commitments.

Filed Under: D-A-CH Market, Fennobiz, News

Steady employment growth in Switzerland

02/03/2020 By Fennobiz

The fourth quarter numbers of the year 2019 published by the Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland show that the total number of jobs in the country rose by 1.2% in comparison to the same quarter in 2018.

Not many countries can report uninterrupted growth for a decade. In the above quarterly comparison an open positions increase of 3.700 was recorded. This is 5% more than in the corresponding quarter a year earlier.

The Swiss economy is doing very well in general. The federal budget ended 2019 with another high ordinary surplus of CHF 3.1 billion (about EUR 2.91 at the beginning of March 2020). The figure is provisional at this stage. The outlook for 2021 – 2023 is seen as stable.

No wonder we are seeing increasing interest in entering the Swiss market. Shouldn’t your company be here too? Give us a call or leave a message on our website and we’ll discuss what kind of opportunities there could be for your solutions.

Filed Under: D-A-CH Market, News

Make Better Prepared Business Decisions

08/11/2016 By Fennobiz

Copyright Canva.com

Blonay, Switzerland: Today, Fennobiz GmbH, the Swiss sales and marketing company specialising in helping Nordic hi-tech companies to enter the Western European markets, announced it has signed an agency agreement with the Finnish company Datapartner Oy. Having helped create new business and opportunities for a number of Nordic, German and local companies Fennobiz is now expanding its offering the leading solution Invest for Excel® from DataPartner.

“A lot of individual spreadsheets are created in organisations for evaluating business cases and investment opportunities and this can be challenging. There might also be a doubt about whether the calculations are really correctly made. Invest for Excel® will provide our customers with a reliable and complete solution and it is already available in multiple languages, including German. We are excited about the great potential for the solution on the Swiss market”, said the CEO of Fennobiz, Mr Pekka Niskanen.

Mr Jens Westerbladh, CEO of DataPartner, said “We have already helped over 1.500 organisations worldwide, such as Daimler, to make better prepared business decisions and now we are delighted to bring our solution to the Swiss market together with Fennobiz, building on their wide customer network and practical approach to customer service”.

Invest for Excel® is

  • designed for private and public sector organisations of all sizes for
  • capital budgeting, financial modelling and valuation
  • providing a secure and correct way of preparing data for business decisions

About Fennobiz GmbH:

Fennobiz, established in 2011, is on a mission to help hi-tech companies enter the Swiss, German and Austrian markets. The company acts as sales agents for a number of Nordic companies and also provides direct sales services to Swiss and German companies in the ICT business.

About Datapartner Oy:

DataPartner is a global provider of software products for capital budgeting, financial modelling and valuation. We also offer consulting services and training. DataPartner was established in 1987 in Finland. In Northern Europe, DataPartner is the leading software supplier for capital budgeting. Currently we experience a fast growth on a global level, serving companies and corporations from all industries in over 50 countries.

Filed Under: Business, Fennobiz, News

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