Anne Tufte, head of sport in Norway at the Nordic Entertainment (Nent) Group, is to leave the broadcaster as one of 45 announced job losses.
Nent has revealed that 39 employees of the Norwegian television business and six from the radio business are leaving.
Along with Tufte, the departures will include Andreas Bakka Hjertø, Nent’s programming director in Norway, commercial director Bjorn Erik Broady Aasebø, content adviser Morten Aass and digital director Trygve Refvem, reports Kampanje, the Norwegian media website.
Nent has attributed the exits to the recent re-organisation of the Nent Group across the Nordic markets and internationally “by functional areas and not country borders as previously [was the case]”.
At the start of September, Nent revealed details of a wide-ranging group restructuring of its senior management team to be implemented on October 1. At the time, Nent said that the model would be “the best structure for a leading streaming player and content producer with multi-market strategy and significant growth ambitions”.
Vegard Klubbenes Drogseth, the chief executive of Nent Norway, was one of the divisional heads to step down from a trimmed group executive management team.
Tufte has held her current role for three years, having previously worked as a sports rights executive at TV2, the Norwegian free-to-air commercial broadcaster. In 2000, she started her career at English Premier League side Liverpool, initially as a senior brand manager and then senior business development manager and partnerships operations manager.
Nent has retained and won a wide range of sports rights since being spun off from the Modern Times Group last year, including a summer spending spree in 2018 ahead of its listing on the Nasdaq Stockholm stock exchange earlier this year.
Earlier this month, Nent agreed a new deal until 2028 with the Infront agency for rights to national team events organised by the International Ice Hockey Federation. The five-year agreement runs from 2024 to 2028 and is for exclusive rights in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
Other rights properties held by Nent include the Premier League, Formula One motor racing, handball’s World and European Championships, International Skating Union events, FIS skiing competitions, golf’s Open Championship and women’s football competitions. It is also broadcasting the Rugby World Cup, which concludes at the weekend.
President and chief executive of Nent, Anders Jensen, said recently that the group structural changes would help continue investment into content. He stated: “We are moving from a country-based model to a structure based on focused areas of responsibility working across markets, products and brands. The new structure will help us to take decisions faster, scale flexibly, and generate significant savings to enable our continuing investment into content and technology.”