Easee names new CEO after a dramatic turnaround
Øyvind Stavland Osjord is promoted from finance chief to CEO of Easee. The handover completes the company's journey from a Swedish sales ban and mass layoffs back to profit.
On Wednesday 2 July, the charging company Easee appointed Øyvind Stavland Osjord as its new chief executive. He is promoted from the role of chief financial officer and succeeds Anthony Fernandez. The handover is undramatic in form, but it marks the end of one of the most dramatic chapters in recent Norwegian business history: the journey from a Swedish sales ban and mass layoffs back to profitability.
For the Stavanger company, which only a few years ago looked as though it might collapse, the timing is anything but accidental. Osjord takes over a business that has just turned losses in the hundreds of millions into profit – and that has secured new, long-term owners along the way.
An internal promotion
Osjord has been Easee's CFO since February 2025 and has played a central role in rebuilding the company's finances. He joined from the role of CFO at the listed company Goodtech ASA, has held senior positions at SAR and Roxel Group, among others, and was previously part of the investment team at the private equity fund HitecVision. In other words: a finance man pulls the company out of crisis and is then handed the keys to the whole shop.
"Getting the chance to lead this fantastic group of people is a dream," Osjord says in the company's statement.
Chair of the board Sigvart Voss Eriksen says the board "has full confidence in his ability to lead the company into the next phase."
From 414 million in the red to black figures
The backdrop makes the appointment more than a routine change of leadership. In 2023, Easee posted a result of minus 414 million kroner. When Fernandez took over as CEO in the summer of 2024, the task was to save a company in free fall. Two years on, the picture has flipped: for 2025 Easee reported a profit of 18.6 million kroner, around 80 percent of its revenue comes from exports, and the company is growing again in Europe.
The ownership side has been tidied up along the way, too. Easee has secured new, long-term ownership through Brødrene Jensen and the investment company AWC, in a transaction that values the company at around 1.6 billion kroner.
"Easee is back on top, and I'm proud of how far we've come together," says outgoing chief executive Anthony Fernandez, who stays on in an advisory role for a transition period of a couple of months.
The Swedish shock
The crisis that Osjord and Fernandez have worked their way out of began in Sweden. In March 2023, the Swedish Electrical Safety Authority (Elsäkerhetsverket) imposed a sales ban on the Easee Home and Easee Charge chargers. At the heart of the case was earth-fault protection: Easee used an electronic solution instead of a traditional electromechanical residual-current device, and the authority argued the chargers did not meet the requirements – and that the manual gave a misleading picture of what protection was actually built in.
The consequences were brutal. Easee cut its headcount from around 500 to 140 employees and reduced operating costs by more than a third, and 138 staff in Norway were furloughed. The company disputed the conclusions, arguing that the standards should be read as guidelines rather than absolute rules, but the damage to sales and reputation was done. In 2024 the result was still down by 232 million kroner.
From Stavanger rocket to crisis – and back
The story is all the more striking because, before the ban, Easee was one of the hottest growth companies in Norway. It was founded in Stavanger in 2018 by Jonas Helmikstøl, Kjartan Egeberg and Espen Kverneland, and grew at lightning speed on a simple premise: a smarter, more compact EV charger. Within a few years Easee had become one of the most talked-about technology companies in the country, selling into a string of European markets. Today it operates in 23 countries across Europe.
That a Norwegian growth company attracts new industrial owners after such a downturn fits a broader picture of a Norwegian technology scene in motion – not unlike the way foreign technology companies are now setting up in Norway to tap local expertise.
For Easee, the Swedish ruling was a costly lesson in how much standards and certification matter in an industry that sells safety-critical equipment straight into people's homes. The company disputed the conclusions, as noted, but at the same time spent considerable resources documenting and further developing the chargers. The turnaround was therefore not only about cutting costs, but about rebuilding trust in the markets the company depends on. That the 2025 accounts ended in the black is the clearest sign that this work has begun to bear fruit.
A new phase for the charging industry
The leadership change comes in a market that is maturing fast. Norway is a world leader in electric cars, and home charging has become an ordinary part of the house – a market where Easee competes against rivals such as Zaptec and Wallbox. After a few years in which the industry was about standards, safety and survival, it is now swinging back to what it started with: product, price and international growth. The electrification Easee lives off is closely tied to Norway's other great advantage, its clean and abundant power.
For Osjord, the task will be to prove that the turnaround was not merely a rescue operation, but the start of something durable. The groundwork has been laid by a finance chief who will now steer the ship himself. The appointment has been reported by outlets including E24, and the company's own statement is available via NTB.
