Ice Group – which already has a 7.4% market share in Norway – said today that it plans to raise three billion kroner to challenge the duopoly.
“My team and I look forward to unlocking the significant potential we see in the Norwegian market,” said CEO Eivind Helgaker.
The company plans to launch an initial public offering (IPO) of its shares on the Oslo stock exchange. Access Industries, which is the majority shareholder at the moment, will “remain a substantial shareholder”, it said.
“In the past three years Ice Group has grown its total smartphone market share in Norway from zero to 7.4%,” said Helgaker. “The key has been honest customer communication with no hidden fees or small print in our contracts, plus highly competitive products.”
The company is chaired by Hans-Holger Albrecht, a former president and CEO of Millicom International who is now CEO of Deezer, one of the largest music streaming services worldwide. He said: “We have built a strong platform in Scandinavia over the past decade and have conducted numerous structural changes in the past year to simplify our business and ownership structure and to refocus our operations in Scandinavia.”
In 2017 it bought a 30% stake in Nextel Brazil and then sold it this year for $70 million, to Access Industries, its parent company. It also demerged operations in Indonesia and the Philippines.
Ice Group offers mobile broadband services in Sweden and Denmark as well as Norway: the former Ice.net rebranded to Net1 in both countries in 2010.
The company had revenues of 1.23 billion kroner (€128 million) in the first nine months of 2018, up 30% on the same period of 2017.
The team includes CFO Henning Karlsrud, a former senior vice president and head of group strategy at Telenor.
Helgaker said: “We will continue using our customer-centric strategy as a vehicle to become an even more powerful challenger to the Norwegian mobile network operator duopoly. Additionally, we believe our continued network build-out will further enhance our customer proposition, competitiveness and overall profitability.”
