Nortal increased revenue in 2020 to over €100 million, EBITDA up by 34%

According to Nortal Founder and CEO, Priit Alamäe, 2020 will undeniably be remembered as the year of disruption and constant change. “At the beginning of the year when the pandemic hit, the focus shifted immediately to the safety of our employees and helping our customers cope with the disruption brought about by Covid-19,” said Alamäe.

“I’m proud that our teams were able to seamlessly transition to home offices, while continuing to create value for our customers around the world, and glad our customers keep putting their trust in us, as witnessed by the strong revenue growth in 2020,” added Alamäe.

Last year, the company showed strong financial results across all home markets, proving the resilience of the business model, strong customer relationships and demand for services. By geography, the most significant contributors to growth in 2020 were Germany and the U.S.

“Nortal is well-positioned as an international company with strong local presence in some of the world’s largest and most innovative markets. We are now focusing on future growth both organically and through acquisitions, relying on the strengths we have built and reinforced during 2020,” remarked Alamäe.

Expansion in Germany

In September 2020, the company acquired Schütze, a recognized strategic consulting and IT solutions company in Germany. “This transaction was integral to our expansion strategy in 2020 in Europe, bolstering our position significantly and creating a transatlantic digital transformation powerhouse of 1000 experts,” added Alamäe.

Following the acquisition, the company will continue to focus on integration and creating value from the merger in 2021. “Over the upcoming years, we expect to continue our growth path in Germany, through leveraging our existing offerings for e-government, enhancing our digital healthcare services and expanding to Industry 4.0,” added Alamäe.

Facing the uncertainty with digitalization

The work we have done with our customers has allowed governments in Europe and the GCC region to continue to function even in lockdown mode. Ensuring that essential government services are available online, and enabled our private sector customers – businesses all around the world – to react quickly to the changing circumstances, customer expectations, and rapidly adapting the business models.

Last year, we also continued the work with our government customers to create significant innovation in the sector. For instance, the first-in-the-world proactive government services for the social security system in Estonia, to cope with changing needs of the citizens and eliminating the requirement of navigating the complexities of bureaucracy in order for individuals to access services. The services created by us support the citizens at the right time, without needing them to apply for the benefits that they are already eligible for.

Another great example would be one of the only fully register-based censuses in the world for Oman that has been highlighted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF) as an international model to be followed in shifting from traditional censuses to register-based censuses.

In 2020, we were proud to also support our healthcare customers, so they could focus on high-impact and mission-critical work – for instance, we helped them to re-organize their work in order to shift the focus to Covid-related intensive care work, minimizing the impact on everyday operations.

Alamäe added that for the enterprises, automation, extensive use of data in production, logistics and customer-service processes, and the ability to quickly adjust their business models have become questions of survival and resilience. “A major part of Nortal’s growth in 2020 is attributable to the value delivered in these areas,” said Alamäe.

Investing in high-performance teams globally

Nortal is known for a distributed engagement model that allows the company to tap into their interdisciplinary global talent pool in an agile manner, and assemble and ramp up teams of top experts with the required competences for a particular customer’s specific need on short notice.

“In 2020, this model was put through the ultimate stress test and became the foundation for our fast transition to home offices and the continuation of seamlessly working with our customers. We have also leveraged the model to support our customers in setting up their own remote teams,” added Alamäe.

During upcoming years, Nortal will continue to invest in building on the distributed engagement model that is the foundation for managing high-performance teams globally.

In 2020, similarly to previous years, the company also put significant focus last year on employee engagement, well-being, and professional development through knowledge-sharing and training hubs, which Nortal calls HIVEs.

*Combined revenue include the full year revenue of Nortal AG (former Schütze AG). Schütze AG was acquired in September 2020. Consolidated EBITDA includes EBITDA of Nortal AG (former Schütze AG) only from the day of acquisition till the end of year.