Group 
Elanders’ CEO started on the floor in the graphic industry
Article from AGI, published on their website 8/13/2009
Magnus Nilsson, 42, became CEO of Elanders on the 26th of June. That meant moving home from China, where he had taken operations from idea to fully functioning while he was also Business area User Manuals Manager.
Magnus Nilsson started on the floor in the graphic industry. He grew up in Eslöv where he began working at Esselte Sandéns which prints things like lottery tickets and bingo cards. He moved on to Wallin & Dalholm in neighbouring Lund and then to BTJ Tryck before taking a position at Elanders in Malmö in 1987.
He started off as a business developer at Elanders and was part of the big boom printing manuals for Sony Ericsson’s mobile phones. Elanders tagged along when telephone manufacturing moved abroad by launching printing plants in first Hungary and then China. Magnus Nilsson built the plant in China from the ground up and it now employs several hundred people.
“Per Brodin hired me in Malmö. When he got the job to start up a plant in Hungary I followed along for a year and I was responsible for production, IT, business development – I did a little bit of everything.”
“After that year I came home and was given responsibility for operations in Malmö and Trelleborg. I was involved in the tough decision to shut down operations in Trelleborg. I stayed as MD in Malmö until May 2005 when I was asked to move to China and start up operations there. By then I had taken the chance to take some courses and a year of business economics through Örebro University.”
“In China I had the honour of launching Elanders’ first packaging line. There are currently 285 people working at our Chinese printing plant. While manuals have grown thinner, companies are investing more and more in packaging, so we have grown a lot in that area. It’s almost 40 percent of our sales in China.”
“The whole idea of packaging came from Per Brodin. When we negotiated the start up in China Per suggested that when manuals were up and running the contract would allow us to produce packaging. So now we have ordered packaging machines for Hungary and we’ll begin manufacturing there this year. In other words, we’re transferring know-how from China to Europe.”
“What does Elanders plan for the future?”
“We have seen traditional printed matter volumes shrink or even disappear. We have to move into new areas and packaging is one of them.”
“We will continue to develop in Web-to-print, a strong field for us in Germany. This product is much bigger for us down there. The Germans have been particularly successful with photo albums. We have an incomparable digital printing plant in Germany.”
“We have to ride on the fact that we are global and work more actively to sell this in to our existing and potential customers. There aren’t very many global printers. We are going to take advantage of the knowledge I’ve gained after five and half years abroad.”
“We’re also going to focus heavily on Sweden to create an even more attractive offer for existing and new customers. We are going to put together a complete offer that also includes products and services produced outside of Sweden. We are going to make sure that Elanders is perceived as one company with a common offer.”
