MCI INTERVIEW MCI INTERVIEW
Money Man
In November last year, Jan Frykhammar became CFO of Ericsson. Here he tells MCI how a long history at the Swedish vendor allows him to bring more than just number crunching to the role.
J
an Frykhammar may be new to the role of chief financial officer at Ericsson, but he’s not new to
the company. He joined the Swedish vendor in 1991 and has held a vari- ety of roles, heading up sales for the Global Services unit, looking after the financial and commercial elements of the global Vodafone account and shouldering the CFO responsibilities for Ericsson’s US operation. Not all freshly appointed blue chip
CFOs have the company DNA running through them to this degree but Fryk- hammar says that his lengthy service with Ericsson—something he shares with CEO Hans Vestberg, as he points out—enables him to become involved in all areas of the business, and not just the numbers. “The more you understand about
the business, the more you can add value in strategic questions around what markets to enter,” he says. “It also helps to broaden relationships with customers. I meet a lot of opera- tor CFOs because there are common things we can drive like efficiencies and new business models.” This breadth of responsibility is reflected in conversation with Fryham- mar as he ranges between the kind of future-gazing usually reserved for marketing specialists and the finan- cial decision-making that is the more traditional preserve of the CFO. Erics- son’s prediction that there will be 50 billion mobile connections by 2020 has become something of a hobbyhorse for Ericsson and Frykhammar loses little time in warming to the theme. “Look at electricity as an example,”
he says. “In the past electricity was just used in houses for heat and light. Today all the devices in the home re- quire electricity. Think about that in the context of mobile communications; that’s the potential." It is also the future and, when
Frykhammar took the CFO position in November 2009, he had rather more immediate and prosaic matters to deal
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Jan Frykhammer, CFO, Ericsson
with, namely to deliver the firm’s Q4 results. With those out of the way, his responsibilities are now four-fold, he says. First off, he wants Ericsson to grow faster than the market. This is a sales ambition, he says, rather than a target related to a specific timeframe. Second he wants the firm to develop best in class margins and, third, he wants to improve Ericsson’s cash con- version. Fourth on the list, and perhaps the most interesting challenge the firm faces, is to engineer a turnaround at its two joint ventures. Frykhammar occupies a seat on the
board of each of these firms, handset player Sony Ericsson and silicon vendor ST Ericsson, both of which have been the subject of speculation around Ericsson’s ongoing involve-
ment. Sony Ericsson held a press conference on the eve of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February and, while Sony chief Howard Stringer was on hand to give a presentation and show support, senior Ericsson representatives were notable by their absence. Unsurprisingly, and despite the question marks that analysts and ob- servers have raised about the viability of Sony Ericsson and ST Ericsson, Fryhammar says he has no concerns over their performance. ST needs to be shown patience, he says. “That joint venture was only formed in Q1 of 2009, so its newly created, with new management,” he says. “They have their plan in place and they are executing on that.”
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