| Summary: | Digitalization is hitting the energy industry by empowering energy producers and retailers, butmore importantly it’s empowering the end customers and the energy producers and retailers areno longer in possession of all power. Due to digitalization, energy networks are beingmodernized and new emerging technologies called smart grids and smart meters have beenintroduced. Smart grids can automatically monitor energy flows and adjust to changes in energysupply and demand. Smart meters on the other hand empowers the consumers to adapt theirenergy usage in both time and volume to different energy prices throughout the day by costcuttingtheir energy.With empowered and conscious end-customers, electricity retailers will have to compete in newways or risk losing their business. There is a risk that the majority of the over 100 electricityretailers in Sweden will be wiped out with time if data and information is not leveraged to theend-customers. This is potentially also threatening the business of TSU as well as othercompanies providing IT solutions to the energy market.For long Tieto Smart Utility (TSU) has offered IT services for both electricity retailers anddistributors across the Nordics. In relation to recently developed solutions as well as theopportunities and challenges created by digitalization and disruptive technologies such as smartmeters, the Nordic countries are in the forefront. Hence, TSU sees a potential in increasing itspresence in Western Europe to provide services to the retailers and distributors. However, inorder to expand to Western European countries TSU seeks to have a greater marketunderstanding of the different markets, in terms of for example market size, market structure,regulations. The problem is to have a structured and comprehensive way to increase marketunderstanding when assessing new West European energy markets due to the major differencesin each country.This thesis therefore aims to develop a framework which enables IT solution providers toconduct a market opportunity analysis in order to increase market awareness and assess theopportunities and potential in Western European markets, influenced by the smart-meter roll outand thus facilitate strategic decisions.A framework has been developed on the foundation on existing frameworks and applied onTSU by conducting a case study on a market opportunity assessment tool for energy IT solutionproviders. The framework consists of three levels of analysis; European-, Country- andCustomer Level which intends to identify market opportunities and potential.This thesis provides a framework for companies who wants to assess market opportunities andfacilitates strategic decisions regarding the potential of entering the markets. The findings of thisthesis has shown that the market opportunities for TSU are the greatest in Germany especiallydue to the market magnitude as well as the status for the smart meter roll-out. Furthermore,since IT solution providers usually offers many different services and solutions, the findings canbe used in a larger extent in order to asses the potential depending on type service and solution.
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