MicroLink

» see microlink.ee as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MicroLink started in Tallinn in August 1991, which is the month Estonia finished becoming a country again, and the founding story its own people told reporters for the next seventeen years involves leafing through hotel telephone books in Asia to find component manufacturers, buying parts with cash and hauling them home in sports bags. Rainer Nõlvak and Hanno Haamer assembled the first five 286-based machines in the spring of 1992. Haamer's own description of it is better than anything written since: putting the first computers together was pure knee-top work. He had a day job and could only do it in the evenings, so Nõlvak carried most of it.

A personal computer in Estonia then cost about 2,500 dollars, or 40,000 roubles, which was roughly the price of a Zhiguli. A programmer earned seven dollars a month. The first MicroLink machines went to Eesti Pank, the central bank. By 2001 Estonian-made PCs held about 71 percent of their own domestic market, and over the sixteen years to 2008 something over 200,000 machines went out under the ML label.

The detail that makes this one land for me is the keyboard. MicroLink got Estonian-alphabet keyboards made by inflating its order quantities until an Irish manufacturer agreed to run them, and Haamer said afterward that a keyboard adapted for Estonia definitely gave them a marketing edge early on. Turkish has the same problem and the same solution, which is why every machine I have owned since the 1990s has had a Turkish layout with its own letters printed on the keys, bought in a country big enough that nobody had to beg a factory for it. Estonia had well under two million people and had to beg.

~ the record ~

~ fifteen companies in two years ~

Allan Martinson was appointed to run the company in 1998, which both Estonian and English accounts treat as the turning point, and what followed was a dot-com roll-up. Private equity arrived from January 1999, starting with 47 million kroons from the Baltic Investments Fund and another 59 million that autumn. Across 1999 and 2000 MicroLink grew roughly fivefold through about fifteen acquisitions, including the two largest IT firms in Latvia and seven Baltic internet providers. It also ran the Delfi portals, which by early 2003 had 1.05 million users across three countries, claimed as 76 percent of all Baltic internet users.

Revenue peaked in the financial year to mid-2002 at something close to 950 million kroons, about 60 million euros, on 640 staff. That is the number that supports the claim MicroLink made about itself continuously from 2001 onward and that the Estonian business press repeated without argument: the largest information technology company in the Baltic states. The English-language summary of the company says it reached nearly a thousand employees, and I cannot find any contemporaneous figure above 640.

~ cut along national borders ~

It was dismembered rather than bankrupted, and it was profitable at the end. Wholesale distribution had already gone in 1996. Computer manufacturing was sold to its own management in June 2003 and continued as ML Arvutid, which went bankrupt on 25 June 2010. Delfi was sold in 2004 for 81 million kroons and resold three years later for something like 51 million euros, a transaction Martinson later called the company's biggest mistake. SAF Tehnika was floated in Riga in 2004. Across the whole wind-down, shareholders got back just under 700 million kroons.

Then in May 2005 the three Baltic incumbent telephone companies bought what remained between them, and each absorbed its own country's operations. The Estonian chief executive had said it himself that spring: even the largest IT firm in the Baltics was too small to compete with the global corporations. A company whose single distinguishing feature was being pan-Baltic was divided along national borders on day one, the Latvian arm eventually becoming Lattelecom Technology and the Lithuanian arm becoming Hostex. Estonia's competition authority also required the sale of MicroLink's own fibre network in three cities as a condition of clearance.

~ the signs came off the building ~

The brand survived inside Eesti Telekom for six more years as the group's IT arm, selling off what was left as it went: business software to Helmes in 2009, information management to Webmedia in January 2011. By then MicroLink Eesti was 171 people and 15.9 million euros of revenue, serving over five hundred clients. Elion, which was 1,200 people and 189.4 million euros, signed the merger agreement on 24 January 2011 and completed it on 31 March. The Estonian business register records the strike-off on exactly that date. Äripäev's report the same morning carried the sentence that mattered: the MicroLink trademark will gradually disappear from use in the coming months.

It took about eleven weeks. On the afternoon of 14 June 2011 workmen unscrewed the MicroLink signs off the building at Lõõtsa 8 in Tallinn, and the newspaper sent a photographer. Elion itself became Telia Eesti in 2016, erasing the name that had erased this one. microlink.ee is still registered, to Telia, parked and serving nothing, with the expiry date pushed out to 2027.

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