From the CoB: Magic Quadrants

FROM THE DESK OF COB

Matti Manner

Prohoc in the invisible Magic Quadrant

No, we haven’t made it to the infamous Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. It only covers IT-related categories, so there’s no MQ for industry partner services. Bummer! But we can still pretend there is and look at where we are in terms of Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute and whether it places us as a leader, challenger, visionary or a niche player in our market. We set ourselves on a growth journey in our strategy review in the summer of 2020. It was a time when business expectations globally turned to an upward trend after an all-time worst downturn by Covid-19. Our project business had suffered a major impact. Our focus was only on getting our people back home safely from project sites around the world. We were a bit less than 100 people at the time. It was a good moment for a genuine restart. Today, Prohoc Group has two main business areas that slightly overlap creating an industry partner service offering for global OEMs, EPCs, and asset owners. With our project services and a team of more than 200 project doers, we help customers deliver their projects successfully. Our manufacturing and operations & maintenance service with its team of nearly 200 people supports customers to build their products in a smart and sustainable way, and maintain their manufacturing assets for productive use. By combining these capabilities, Gartner's Magic Quadrant we can help customers with various demanding projects. There are opportunities everywhere Challengers in our market. On one hand, we see interestABILITY TO EXECUTE Niche players Visionaries ing development in the investment project space in the Nordics. Project volumes and sizes are very promising. Investors and project developers

Leaders are looking for more collaborative ways to implement their projects. This opens the door for mid-sized project and construction management companies to challenge the traditional large EPCMs. In manufacturing, we see increasing interest in Proactor’s value proposition, challenging the traditional personnel rental business with a more managed manufacturing service setup.

Both markets we serve are roughly 1B in euro size and growing double digits year after year. We see a very foggy future though. It means we have a 2 % market share from the project and construction management services in the Nordics and a roughly 1 % market share from the available market for Proactor’s services in Finland.

That makes us a niche player in both markets. We are very happy about that. When placing our fellow market players in the quadrant though, it excites us to see that compared to our peers, we mostly lack the Ability to Execute. We believe we run a more differentiated strategy and focus than that of our peers. Maybe it’s also easier for a smaller ship to navigate these VUCA times. In fact, we believe we are well positioned now to start putting our focus on the execution as we feel we have found our spot in terms of market strategy.

I am super thankful that we have such visionary partners and customers who have invited us to co-develop new ways of working. They have been dragging us towards the Visionary segment of the quadrant. The same thankfulness goes to all our new prohocians who have joined our team during these past two years. You are almost 300 people during this time. That’s huge!

Our focus is now primarily on walking the talk. Fulfilling our promises to all our great people who have joined us, and to our long-term customers, and the new ones, showing confidence to continue our journey together. Let’s revisit this MQ in some years’ time and see if we’ve been able to claim our space in the Visionary segment.