2020 – the year of change: Change is the only constant
Once a year, we like to take our legendary race yacht, L4, out to break a new record. She needs to earn all the team effort and hard work we invest in her every year. On a cold, windy January morning, we headed out from Palma with our pro team – sailors that, combined, had sailed around the world more than 25 times. The weather forecast looked good. The start was fairly calm and at the south coast of Mallorca and the sea was calm too. However, a change was coming, and the weather went from calm to stormy and as we rounded Cap de Formentor to turn west along the North coast, we faced one of the worst storms in the history of Spain. It was later named Gloria. After a few tough hours, L4 had broken a 15-year-old record sailing around the island of Mallorca. That was a challenging start to the year – but more was to come.
In March 2020, Covid-19 started spreading in Europe, resulting in suffering and sorrow throughout the world, and in lockdowns in most countries. At Trifork, we were very fortunate and only had very few incidents with illness related to Covid-19, and our overall sick leave was only 2% in 2020.
In the first 4-5 months after the initial lockdowns, several of our customers had to postpone ongoing development and find ways to handle the new way of working with remote and distributed teams. Our teams of business units supported this process admirably, and I would like to thank everyone at Trifork for their commitment and leadership in keeping the spirit up as well as keeping our customers happy. I don’t believe we will ever go back to working the same way as we did before. We will find a balance between working remotely and working co-located in small autonomous teams, which very much reflects our DNA. We stay committed to developing innovative solutions within our six business areas – Digital Health, FinTech, Smart Building, Smart Enterprise, Cyber Protection and Cloud Operation – by creating smart and user-friendly software.
The lockdowns prevented us from inspiring our customers and community of software developers at our GOTO Conferences. But instead, we created a whole new online and virtual universe of conferences and events by building a virtual copy of our CodeNode conference center and by introducing a new book club for software professionals. This made our connections to thought-leaders within the software community even closer than before. Our YouTube tech channel has grown to more than 210,000 subscribers with more than 19 million views of the published sessions and is now one of the largest in the world.
The impact from Covid-19, with additional pressure on the healthcare systems, show us the importance of continuous improvements of IT-systems in this sector, in order to increase capacity and make services more flexible. Trifork is very committed to being a part of this development as we keep innovating new solutions within Digital Health.
In the second half of 2020, Trifork, together with the Danish Organization of General Practitioners and the Danish Ministry of Health, successfully launched a new mobile app, “My Doctor”, as a digital channel for communication between the citizens and their doctors. The app, which has more than one million downloads in Denmark, provides a broad spectrum of services including ordering prescriptions, viewing test results and booking video consultations.
The world has changed far beyond healthcare and we are all challenged in the way we do business, unveiling the need to rethink business models and accelerate digitization – a task that is in our hearts and minds and where our dedicated, skilled and creative employees can excel and make a difference when teaming up and developing solutions with our customers.
This, I believe, has been the reason for us being able to keep productivity up in the second half of 2020, and once again increase both revenue and profit despite the challenging year. For 2020, we in our Trifork segment grew revenue to EURm 115, while EBITDA ended at EURm 20.2, meeting our expectations.
Read the full CEO letter and download the Annual Report here.