risk management

At EURODYNAMO, we believe that every risk also presents an opportunity. We work proactively to identify and monitor the most important risks through an enterprise risk management process as described below.

The purpose of this program is to achieve the following objectives:

Fewer Surprises – To ensure that all key business risks are identified, evaluated, controlled and monitored.

Effective decision making – To assist management at all levels with prioritising their activities and hereby create room for EURODYNAMO to achieve its strategic objectives.

Reduce impact and likelihood of identified risks – To assist the Board and management with their prioritisation and understanding of risks.

Some Key Highlights of EURODYNAMO’s Risk Management Journey.

EURODYNAMO bases its risk management program on the COSO framework (www.coso.org) and classifies risks as either Strategic, Operational, Compliance or Financial.

We consider risk management an integral part of managing our markets and fundamental to our governance structure and related accountabilities, thereby encouraging a healthy risk culture.

The Board of Directors has oversight responsibility over the risk management process and oversees the management of risk through the Audit Committee.

We have an integrated process for managing risks throughout our organization in accordance with our Enterprise Risk Management policy and embedded risk appetite. 

Enterprise Risk Management supports our markets and our management teams by embedding risk management in our key day-to-day business processes and in identifying, assessing, quantifying, monitoring, reporting, and mitigating the risks taken by our markets and EURODYNAMO LLC overall.

We also recognize the fact that ongoing mitigation actions might not always fully mitigate impacts on our business, results of operations, cash flows, liquidity or financial condition.

For more information about Enterprise Risk Management process (including internal control over financial reporting), refer to our latest annual report. Continuous awareness of our risk management procedures are informed through a detailed guidance document.

 

STRATEGIC RISK

Strategic risks are those which threatens EURODYNAMO’s ability to achieve its strategic objectives.

In many cases (but not all) these are operational, compliance or financial risks which when aggregated have a material effect on not only the business of the local market but of the entire EURODYNAMO group.

Risks which could threaten EURODYNAMO’s ability to achieve its strategic objectives are assessed by the Group Leadership Team (GLT).

The Head of Internal Audit is responsible for coordinating the strategic risk assessment process and for escalating risks to the Group Leadership Team for discussion and final assessment.

The strategic risk management process begins with identification of risk areas.

Each of these risk areas are then assigned to a risk owner (an individual GLT member) who is responsible for breaking down the risk into quantifiable risk scenarios, for which potential impact and likelihood is then assessed.

The risk owners are also responsible for identifying actions to mitigate the risks, where possible and to monitor and report any development to the rest of the Group Leadership Team.

The strategic risks are also reported and discussed with the Audit Committee and/or the full Board of Directors.

The Strategic Risk process is actively involved in monitoring various emerging risks. Risk emergence is monitored for existing risks from the perspective of emergence of new variables or completely new risks.

For example, spectrum risk is an inherent risk to our business. The winning of spectrum auctions is vital in order for EURODYNAMO to conduct a substantial part of the business. A failure to obtain a spectrum license at a reasonable price, award of such license to one of EURODYNAMO’s competitors and the burden of compliance to license requirements could result in EURODYNAMO not being able to upgrade, maintain and expand its network.

Through active monitoring of emerging trends within this risk we believe that the residual impact and likelihood of this risk is relatively low with regard to our most important market.

Active risk mitigation measures exist in the form of processes in place to ensure compliance with license requirements to increase chances of renewal and extension of existing licenses or obtaining new licenses. EURODYNAMO also works in close contact with regulators and industry associations to become aware of upcoming license distributions or redistributions. Despite these active mitigation measures, we continue to acknowledge the fact that the outcome of such mitigation measures is coupled with uncertainty.

A complete list of our most important strategic risks have been described in our annual report with a description of our risk mitigation measures.

 

Operational Report

Operational risks are risks arising from the normal day-to-day business conducted in the markets where EURODYNAMO operates.

This includes for example the risk of: network failure affecting service delivery; system failure or incorrectly applied rates in the billing system affecting our ability bill our customers correctly; fraud causing loss of revenues or increased costs; etc.

Management in each market are responsible for identifying and managing the operational risks. In many cases they are supported in this work by central functions (such as for example Group Security and central Network & IT) who has expertise in specific functional areas and who also are responsible for issuing policies and guidance as a way to mitigate the group’s total risk exposure.

The Internal Audit function performs regular audits of each business in order to assess the adequacy of each process and to highlight unmitigated risks to management. The result of these audits are also presented to the Group CFO and Group CEO as well as to the Board through the Audit Committee.

A complete list of our most important strategic risks have been described in our financial and risk management annual report report with a description of our risk mitigation measures.

 

COMPLIANCE

Compliance means conforming to stated requirements (defined for example in laws, regulations, contracts and policies).

EURODYNAMO is subject to specific requirements imposed by the governments of the countries in which we operate and by the EU. The fact that these are still evolving increases uncertainty and the risk of not being able to comply.

In addition to legal requirements there are also requirements imposed by our customers and the community at large. EURODYNAMO aims to comply also with these requirements which are expressed through our Code of Conduct (CoC) which have to be signed by both employees and by third parties with which EURODYNAMO deals. Hence, we have an obligation to evaluate how well we are doing in this respect and identify areas where there is a risk of non-compliance and the potential effect of those.

As for the operational risks, local management is responsible for ensuring compliance to legal requirements applicable in their countries as well as to the requirements expressed in the EURODYNAMO CoC. The central functions Group Legal and Corporate Responsibility are responsible for issuing guidance, including the CoC, and for consolidating and assessing related risks from a group perspective. Specific aspects of compliance are also assessed by the Internal Audit function in internal audits. 

We consider climate change as one of our key emerging compliance risks. A description of how we monitor and manage this emerging risk as EURODYNAMO Climate Efforts. 

 

FINANCIAL RISKS

EURODYNAMO is exposed to various financial risks such as currency risk, interest risk, liquidity risk, credit risk and various tax related risks.

Financial risk management is mainly centralized to centralized to the Corporate Finance and M&A function (responsible for treasury and tax matters) and the Financial Planning and Reporting function (responsible for impairment recognition). The aim is to control the Group’s financial risks as well as financial costs, and optimize the relation between risk and cost.

There is also a risk of errors in the financial reporting of the company, that accounting principles are not correctly applied etc. resulting in misrepresentation of the company’s financial position.

Financial Planning and Reporting are responsible for issuing guidance and instructions to mitigate this risk.
The Internal Audit function audits the closing and reporting processes in local countries in order to assess the risk of errors (in addition to the audit of the financial statements made by the external auditors of the company).

Various components of the financial risk are monitored and treated as emerging risks due to the changing trends in its variables. For example, currency risk, which is the risk of changes in exchange rates having a negative impact on the Group’s result and equity. Currency exposure is associated with payment flows in foreign currency (transaction exposure) and the translation of foreign subsidiaries’ balance sheets and income statements to SEK (translation exposure).

Through active monitoring of emerging trends within this risk we believe that the residual impact and likelihood of this risk is medium after applying the following mitigation measures:

The Group does not generally hedge transaction exposure.

Translation exposure related to certain investments in foreign operations is hedged by issuing debt or entering into derivative transactions in the currencies involved if assessed as needed. The hedges of net investments in foreign operations were 100 percentage effective in 2019 and 2020 and hence no ineffectiveness was recognized in the income statement.

EURODYNAMO also actively monitors this emerging risk through sensitivity analysis. For example, we determined that a five percent currency movement of all currencies against the Sterling Pound would affect the Group’s revenues and operating profit/loss on an annual basis and also affect the Group’s total net assets. A strengthening of the EURO, STERLING POUND, and DOLLAR towards other currencies would impact net assets negatively.

A complete list of our most important strategic risks have been described in our annual report with a description of our risk mitigation measures.