Day 23- How was Fondia's year 2017?
Now that Santa Claus is putting the final touches to his logistics plan for Christmas – armed with the advise from Fondian lawyers (see Our Project Santa Advent Calendar)– it is also a good time to look back of what we have been up to this year. Have we been naughty or nice, remains to be seen after Christmas Eve…
What we can summarize is clearly this: Year 2017 will remain in the annals of Fondia as a very remarkable year.
On January 12, 2017 our Board of Directors announced that Fondia is exploring the possibility to have its shares listed in the Nasdaq First North Helsinki marketplace. The news created a considerable level of excitement both internally and externally. Throughout the late winter and early spring we were a focus of great curiosity: How will the IPO of the first legal services provider in the Nordics and one of the first worldwide unfold and with what results?
We know now. The share issue was multiple times oversubscribed, and since the trading started on April 4, Fondia share price has seen one of the strongest increases of all the newly listed ones. I want to warmly thank all Fondians for the business success and all our owners and other stakeholders for the great trust you have placed on us!
The foundation of Fondia’s success has always been our strong culture – we like to say that happy Fondians make happy customers. It is not something to take for granted, though. It starts with inviting only such people to join who embrace our values, and we need to every day cherish and live by those values.
Build on the strong cultural foundation, Fondia’s services have indeed continued to make customers happy. In the customer satisfaction survey this year, 98% of the respondents said that they’d recommend Fondia for friends and family. We are naturally deeply grateful and honored by that – the bar is set very high for us : )
The core promise we give to our customers is “We law your business”, which means that we take care of your business as if it were our own. Promise is delivered through our unique continuous service concept, Legal department as a Service LDaaS, which operates by your named team of lawyers, equipped with solid professional experience and modern tools. We also deliver full set of project-based services in, eg, M&A, corporate financing, IPOs and other capital markets projects, dispute resolution, and real estate transactions. This year we added a powerful “engine” to boost both the collaboration and communications among the lawyers and with our customers: MyFondia service platform. It digitalizes the end-to-end services and makes them accessible regardless of time and location. Based on the very positive response of the users this year, we are continuously developing new features to MyFondia, to increase both efficiency and effectiveness of legal work.
And finally, Christmas came early as in October both the Association of Finnish Lawyers and the Federation of Finnish Enterprises awarded Fondia and its founders their annual Enterprise Awards.
It is therefore with deep gratitude and joy that I wish you all, Fondians and friends of Fondia, a very merry Holiday Season and the happiest of New Years!