How to Research Your Competitors in the Norwegian Market

Define competition from the customer's side

A competitor is whatever your customer would choose instead of you. For a company selling HMS software to builders, that includes other software vendors, consultancies that keep HMS documentation for their clients, the builder's own spreadsheet, and doing nothing. An industry code captures only part of that picture.

Write down three groups before you search:

• Direct competitors: companies selling a similar offer to the same customers.
• Substitutes: different offers that solve the same problem (a consultant instead of software, an in-house hire instead of a service).
• Adjacent players: companies that serve the same customers with something else and could add your offer, which can make them future competitors or partners.

Step 1: Build the list

Norway's company register, Enhetsregisteret, gives every company an industry code (NACE, in Norway's SN2025 version) and a registered purpose written by the company. Both help, and both have limits: the code describes the main activity when the company registered, and many companies sell more than their code says.

1. In Propler's free company search, filter by the industry groups where competitors are likely to be registered, and by county if the market is local.
2. Search by name and keywords for the words competitors use about themselves, since many register under broad codes.
3. Add companies you know from your customers: ask whom they buy from today.
4. Check foreign competitors too. Many sell to Norway through a Norwegian branch (NUF), a subsidiary or a distributor, and some only from abroad, in which case they are not in the register at all.

Our guide to finding Norwegian companies by industry explains how the codes work and where they mislead.

Step 2: Size and health from the annual accounts

Norwegian limited companies file annual accounts with Regnskapsregisteret, and the key figures are public. For each competitor, note:

• Revenue and its change from the year before: who is large, who is growing, who is shrinking.
• Operating result and margin: a crowded market often shows thin margins.
• Equity: a competitor with weak equity may compete hard on price or be vulnerable.
• Employees, where the register shows them. The register does not show exact employee counts for many small units, so treat missing numbers as unknown, not as zero.

Remember that one company in the register may be only part of a group, and that a group's Norwegian sales can sit in several companies.

Step 3: Positioning from their own words

Read each competitor's website for: which customers they name, which industries and company sizes they target, whether they publish prices, what they claim to be best at, and which partners or integrations they mention. Five competitors read side by side usually show where the market is crowded and where nobody is talking to a group of customers.

Step 4: Momentum from job ads

Job ads show what a company is building. A competitor hiring salespeople in Bergen is moving into western Norway; one hiring developers for a new product line is extending its offer. Propler shows open job ads from NAV's job portal and company career pages on each company page, and you can tick "open job ads" in the company search.

Step 5: Who wins public contracts

If your market includes public buyers, public tender result notices show who won which contracts, often with values and the length of framework agreements. Search Doffin (Norway's notice database) and TED (the EU's) for your type of contract. A market where one supplier holds long framework agreements with most municipalities behaves very differently from one where contracts are spread thin. See bidding on Norwegian public tenders from abroad.

Step 6: Put it together, honestly

Summarise what you found in a short table of your own: competitor, size, growth, target customers, positioning, signals. Then answer:

• How concentrated is the market? A few large players with most of the revenue, or many small ones?
• Where is the gap? A customer segment, region, company size or price point that nobody serves well.
• What would make a customer switch? Long contracts, integrations and trusted relationships raise switching costs.
• What can you not see? Private pricing, customer lists and win rates are rarely public.

An illustrative example

Imagine a small company that offers bookkeeping automation for restaurants and wants to know how crowded Norway is. It lists the software vendors that target restaurants, the accounting firms that market fixed-price packages to restaurants, and the cash-register suppliers that bundle accounting features. Their accounts show two large vendors growing steadily and many small accounting firms with thin margins; their websites show that almost nobody addresses owner-run restaurants outside the big cities. That is a hypothesis about a gap, not proof: the next step is to talk to ten such restaurants. (This is an illustration of the method, not a finding about the Norwegian restaurant market.)

Mistakes to avoid

• Counting registered companies as competitors. The number of companies in an industry code says how many are registered there, not how many compete with you. Many are inactive, tiny or doing something else.
• Inventing market shares. Without the total market size, revenue ranks show relative size, not shares. Say so in your analysis.
• Ignoring substitutes. In many B2B markets the strongest competitor is the customer's current way of working.
• Assuming one country's market applies to another. Norwegian competition can look very different from Sweden or Germany even in the same industry.

Where Propler fits

Propler covers Norwegian companies. The free company search, company pages with accounts and job ads, and the market analysis for an industry and county (Analyze, free account) give you the register side of competitor research quickly, with the source and date of every figure. For a fuller market method, read how to analyse a Norwegian market, and for the size distribution across industries, see our original research on Norwegian limited companies by industry.