H&H Webranking for state-owned companies

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Few of state-owned companies’ websites meet the capital markets demands according to this year’s survey; H&H Webranking for state-owned companies. The energy giant Vattenfall wins the rankings for the third year in a row, followed by the semi state-owned companies, TeliaSonera, Nordea and SAS. The remaining surveyed companies are falling behind, except for Sveaskog.

Last year's survey showed that the differences between state-owned and listed companies were decreasing. This year, however, state-owned companies have unfortunately lost their previous advancement, primarily due to the fact that most of the included companies have done little to improve their websites.

"Vattenfall, an award winning website since we started 3 years ago, shows once again that they place great emphasis on online communication. Outstanding media relations, together with subscription services and a good structure puts Vattenfall on the podium once again”, says Marcus Eriksson.

This year's ranking includes a total of 22 Swedish companies with state ownership (three semi-stated owned; TeliaSonera, Nordea and SAS).

Strengths and challenges

Areas of improvement for state-owned companies are mainly in the Corporate Governance section, which we found quite interesting since Swedish companies are usually in the forefront in this area. An area where state-owned companies receives higher scores than their listed peers is the career section, which often contains more information for students than on listed companies websites.

Social Media

H&H Webranking also examines whether companies are visible outside the website, in social media channels such as Facebook, twitter and Flickr, just to name a few. State-owned companies are relatively active or "visible" in some of the tested channels such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but unfortunately, less involved in new communications medium such as Youtube or the micro blogging community twitter.

More information