April 5 2022

Outlook intact for the Nordic and DACH tech sector - summary from Pareto Securities' TechIT Conference

Pareto Securities hosted our TechIT conference again on March 30th. More than 65 top managers of listed TechIT companies contributed, representing roughly one fourth of the Top 100 TechIT companies in Sweden, Norway and Germany. Around 900 investors and industry professionals participated, making the TechIT conference one of the largest Tech conferences in the region already in the second year of its existence. The conference hosted three parallel streams from Stockholm, Frankfurt and Oslo, making this year’s event a truly pan-European event.

Outlook and pricing

The conference was kicked off by Pareto Securities' CEO Christian Jomaas and the German Co Head of Investment Banking Gero Wendenburg, who outlined that recent macro challenges lead to both a meaningful correction of the TechIT sector and to a rotation from growth into value and profitable stocks. However, overall sector prospects and earnings outlook for the participating companies remain intact. After recent re-rating, Nordic and German TechIT stocks are now priced at long-term averages providing the potential for interesting investment opportunities.

How to compete against US Big Tech?

Another highlight of the conference was a panel discussion with Øystein Hem, CFO and interim CEO of Pexip, and Nils Olsson, CEO of Lime Technologies with Pareto Tech analyst Knud Hinkel on how to compete successfully with US Big Tech. A key takeaway from the discussion were that it is possible to withstand competitive pressures from the US behemoths as long as one offers distinct performance advantages in a clearly defined niche. However, one should not expect customers to provide credit just for being a challenger as they will always seek the top solutions for their needs and are not willing to “subsidize” suboptimal offerings.

Listen to the full panel discussion as a podcast here: 

Wide sector representation

This and other inspiring expert sessions were accompanied by individual company presentations covering the entire sector bandwidth from well-established and highly profitable software and IT Service companies to young, strongly growing SaaS corporations, many of them emerging in the Nordics in the last couple of years. On top of that, visitors had the chance to learn about a number of adjacent business models in the field of IT Infra, IT Security, FinTech and IT Advertising.

All recordings from the conference is available until April 29 2022. Register here for access to the recordings.

Updates