Help me help you

TL;DR: All roads lead to Bonnier.

At Ingrid, we connect merchants and consumers with carriers. A lot of what we do is about integrating carriers in order to calculate delivery times, know delivery addresses are available, book shipments, generate labels and so forth.?

Usually, it is easy to distinguish one carrier from another. Take Instabox and Airmee, for example. They have different APIs, different personnel, different brands (but increasingly? similar products, hehe). Other times, it becomes a little bit harder to understand what's going on with, say, DHL Express and DHL Freight. Similar brands, different tech, separate customer support. Yet sometimes it becomes really complicated, as in the case of Helthjem, Sweship, Earlybird, MTD and Premo. Same tech, sometimes same personnel, different brands, same owners, similar services.?

Why does it matter? Well, I like to understand how things tie together. It gives me peace of mind, but it also makes it easier to do my job when a merchant contacts us and wants us to add the new Early Bird product, or when a colleague asks if we can just copy the integration we've made for Premo for Early Bird, too?

So, I started digging around a little bit. Googled, talked to some colleagues, read a few press releases. Below is what I've come up with so far.

Sweship is a relatively new company, incorporated earlier this year and owned by Bonnier and Schibstedt. They are using the same technology provider (Digital Innovation) as Helthjem, which is why there is some tech overlay between Helthjem and Sweship. They will be delivering packages with the morning paper, which means? they will be offering the same product as Early Bird? With the same couriers as Early Bird? I don't know. What I do know is that Sweship is changing its name soon.?

Early Bird… Is it a brand, a company or a distribution network? Is it MTD? I'm still not sure, but my best guess is that Early Bird is a part of MTD - kind of a branded product on top of MTD. On Early Bird's site it says that it is "their" personnel who delivers? packages, but I think it is actually Premo and MTD's couriers. The website also says that Early Bird started out as MTD but changed name to Early Bird in 2019, and MTD still exists (see below). To make things even more complicated, Early Bird recently announced that they would partner with Bring to deliver Bring's parcels with the morning paper every day of the week, increasing the competition with PostNord’s Varubrev when they start leaving parcels outside of the door. For how long will Early Bird stick to morning deliveries before they expand to a new "late bloomer" product that offers day/evening deliveries, too? Labor costs are lower during daytime, which gives companies like Citymail and PostNord a competitive advantage that morning? delivery companies have to address, I think.?

DI (Distribution / Innovation) (not to be mixed with Bonnier's Dagens Industri), "the leading technology company for media logistics in Northern Europe", is a Norwegian tech company supplying technical solutions to both Helthjem and Sweship... and the reason their tech looks so similar, I suppose.

Helthjem is a Norwegian equivalent of Early Bird / MTD / Premo (I think). They at least have a similar background - Helthjem spawned out of the network supplying Norwegians with their morning paper. Helthjem is owned by Schibsted, Amedia and Polaris.?

Premo, owned by Bonnier and Shibsted, delivers newspapers in Stockholm with about 1200 couriers. According to Premo's website, Premo is collaborating with Early Bird, and Early Bird is delivering packages in the greater Stockholm area with the help of Premo. They are not a part of MTD.?

MTD is... well... A line has to be drawn, and I'm drawing it here. Trying to break down how MTD is set up seems to be the mother of all rabbit holes, but let's just say it is some type of an umbrella organisation for morning paper delivery, owned by NIM Distribution i Sk?ne AB, NTM Distribution AB, NWT Distribution AB, Point Logistik, Gota Media AB, Prolog KB, Tidningstj?nst AB, V?stsvensk Tidningsdistribution AB and Norrl?ndsk Tidningsutdelning AB. Those,? in turn, are owned by Bonnier News Local, Bonnier News, Stampen, etc.?

Ok, so what have we learned from all of this? Not much, I'm afraid. Only that:?

a) almost all roads lead to Bonnier;?

b) things will probably only get more and more messy as the number of players in the market increase.

And one more thing. Ingrid is partly owned by Adlibris. And who owns Adlibris? Yes, you guessed it. Bonnier does.