ÅF Pöyry Changes Its Brand to AFRY
Swedish ER&D service vendor ÅF Pöyry changed its brand to AFRY, the amalgamation of ÅF and pöyRY. Meanwhile, its legal name will remain ÅF Pöyry.
Few people outside of Sweden will know that ÅF stood for Ångpanneförening, which meant “steam boiler.” AB Ångpanneförening became ÅF AB in 2008 and had been so for the past eleven years.
The reference to Ångpanneförening was no longer relevant to the company. And, the new name AFRY is easy to remember and points to both ÅF and Pöyry.
AFRY has become a major ER&D service vendor, although an atypical one, with a significant presence in infrastructure engineering and manufacturing engineering, and less present in product engineering. The company is little-present in several high-growth areas, e.g., software product engineering. It also mostly present in three countries (Finland, Sweden, and Norway) with growth potential in Denmark and Switzerland.
AFRY definitively has its own profile, and we think its challenge in the years to come will be organic growth. We are expecting organic growth to accelerate in Q2 2020 when the company benefits from the excellent dynamics within the legacy Pöyry. Will this be enough to bring the financial performance of AFRY back to the industry average? Not yet, we think.