In July 2022, Rion announced its plans for the acquisition of a Norwegian acoustic instruments manufacturer, Norsonic AS, and with the finalization of this acquisition in November 2022, Norsonic officially became a member of the RION Group.For this issue, we interviewed Svein Arne Nordby, Norsonic’s Board of Directors chairman, and several employees who accompanied him on his visit to Japan this past August, about Norsonic’s corporate culture and expectations for the future.Norsonic’s officeNorsonic was founded in 1967, with head-quarters in Tranby, about 30 km southwest of Oslo, the capital. The company has established a solid presence, with consolidated sales of 1.2 bil-lion yen (FY2021) and a 25% to 50% share of the individual building acoustics markets in Europe. It has released various innovative products and services, including NorCloud, an environmental monitoring system featuring a sound-based di-rection identification function. All this would indi-cate a company with a large staff; however, it has about 40 employees. This is in stark contrast to Rion, which groupwide has nearly 1,000 employ-ees. As remarked on with some surprise by Karl Henrik Ejdfors, a Norsonic research and develop-ment engineer, “The site, building, and numbers of employees are so much larger in scale than Norsonic’s.” While Norsonic may be small, it has one of the largest shares in the European market and has continued to create unique products en-visioned by no other company. What, then, is the corporate culture underlying this company?Foremost is its flat structure, including man-agement. In Norway, while it’s quite common to change jobs every five to eight years, in contrast, many Norsonic employees have been with the company for more than 30 years. They relate to and respect each other like members of a big family. Affiliations and job descriptions within the company are very flexible. If someone fails to achieve the desired results in their initial position, they can switch to one better suited to their abil-ities. “Most employees will stay for the long term if you let them do the work they want to do and surround them with good co-workers,” said Mr. Nordby. In part, this reflects Norsonic’s culture of seeking an environment in which individuality, capabilities, and ideas are recognized and re-spected.Norsonic’s current core products and services are in the fields of building acoustics, environ-mental monitoring, and calibration. Its fastest growing product is an environmental monitoring system that incorporates cloud technologies, with the capability of identifying the direction of oncom ing sound, a feature not available in Interview and article by Daisuke TomitaWhat are Norsonic’s strengths?14BUSINESS FRONTLINEThe Future of Rion and Norsonic—as envisioned by the staff at Norsonic AS, a Norwegian acoustic instruments manufacturer
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