Portfolio
Nature of Business
Eltel Networks designs, builds, maintains, and enhances the lifelines of society – electricity, telecommunications, railway, aviation, public safety, and enterprise networks. It is the leading
provider of infranet services in northern Europe and offers services that ensures uninterrupted signal and electricity supply to its clients. The business is headquartered in Espoo, Finland and currently operates in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Germany. In December 2009 the business employed c. 7500 employees.
Investment Overview
3i invested in Eltel in June 2007. The business which was borne of a highly active acquisition strategy had created a substantial opportunity for operational improvement and a core element of the business strategy has been to drive performance by streamlining organisational structures and processes and fully integrating past acquisitions. Since our investment we have introduced our Active Partnership approach to drive a comprehensive strategic change plan, involving several operational improvements.
These have included rationalising the generalist structure of workforce into teams specialised by activity for higher productivity and service quality, reversing a ‘top down’ and top-line focused culture by empowering and incentivising the field
organisation through the creation of c.400 local profit centres/teams; and introducing uniform reporting for all teams with clearly defined KPIs linked to stronger incentives.
We have also reviewed key operational levers and have significantly reduced organisational overheads through improved internal processes, reporting and increased managerial spans of control. As a result Eltel has delivered annual overhead cost savings of more than €40m.
