Framfab

» see framfab.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Framtidsfabriken means the future factory, and it started in 1995 out of a computer and roleplaying club in Lund. Jonas Birgersson founded it with four others, opened a Stockholm office in 1997, and made its money building websites for Swedish companies that had worked out they needed one and had no idea how to get it. The name was shortened to Framfab around the 1999 listing, on the grounds that foreigners could say it.

The listing was in June 1999 at 125 kronor a share. That year it went shopping, picking up Netsolutions and Hypernode at home plus a Danish firm called Networkers, and finished with about 800 people across six countries. The year after that it was in thirteen countries with around three thousand. Birgersson became the face of the Swedish internet economy in a way that no consultancy founder has managed since, and the company became the thing people pointed at when they wanted to say how much had changed.

It was never a consumer product. Framfab sold project work to other companies, so there is nothing to miss here in the way you miss a messenger or a forum. What survives instead is a number, and it is still shocking: in the first days of March 2000 the market said this consultancy was worth 42 billion kronor. Fourteen months later it said two kronor a share.

~ the chronicle ~

~ forty-two billion kronor ~

That valuation is the whole bubble in a single figure, because there was no mystery about what Framfab did. It wrote code and design for clients and billed by the hour. A valuation of 42 billion kronor on a business like that was a bet that every company in Europe would keep buying this work, at this rate, indefinitely.

Its best-known side effect was not a website at all. In the summer of 1998 Framfab spun out a unit called B2, which became Bredbandsbolaget in May 1999 and went off to try to wire Sweden with fiber. Birgersson was the founder and public face of that one too, while still running Framfab. So the consultancy that investors were valuing like an infrastructure company had produced an actual infrastructure company and let it leave.

~ the descent ~

The crash arrived in March 2000, in the same weeks as the peak. By October Framfab had three thousand employees and a new chief executive, Johan Wall, who started cutting immediately. Birgersson left the top job that November. In May 2001 the share was down to around two kronor and the company was close to bankruptcy, saved by a rights issue. By August 2001 the headcount was twelve hundred. Revenue settled at 474 million kronor in 2005, a solid mid-sized consultancy and nothing like the number the market had shouted five years earlier.

I turned sixteen in 2000, dialing up from Ankara on a modem that had worked its way to 56k, and the Swedish consulting market was about as far from my screen as a market can be. The crash itself was not far away at all. You could feel it through the sites that stopped loading and the free services that started asking for money, without having any idea that part of it was a company in Lund that had briefly been worth more than most Swedish banks.

~ the name after the name ~

The ending is unusually well documented, down to the day, because it had to be filed. On 13 July 2006 Framfab held an extraordinary shareholders meeting and resolved that the parent company would change its name to LBI International AB, conditional on a merger with its rival LB Icon going through. LB Icon's shares traded for the last time in Stockholm on 26 July and in Amsterdam on 31 July. That same day the Swedish Companies Registration Office registered the merger along with 35,634,133 new Framfab shares issued as the consideration. LB Icon was dissolved, Framfab had 60,522,946 shares outstanding, and the name had one day left on it.

On 1 August 2006 Framfab AB became LBI International AB. The legal entity survived; the brand did not, and neither did LB Icon's. Two companies that had spent a decade competing agreed to be a third thing. The mark hung around for a while as the label on the old Framfab side of the business, and LBI stopped using it in 2009.

Both domains are squatted now, which is the detail that settles it. framfab.com serves a Thai blog about career ideas, and framfab.se serves a Swedish link farm posting about welding certificates and restaurants in Ystad. Neither of them knows what it is sitting on.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »