The NEN Interview: Cliff Hansen - Publishing Director at Lindhardt & Ringhof Education

My thanks to Cliff for taking the time to talk to me recently and to share these insights into the recent acquisition with Nordic EdTech News readers. If you enjoy this interview, be sure to subscribe. It’s the best way to get future newsletters and interviews straight to your inbox.

Many thanks, Jonathan

There is a familiar assumption in European EdTech and educational publishing. It says that Nordic markets are too small, too fragmented and have such niche languages that it is impossible to build a genuinely scalable business here. The real opportunity lies elsewhere in Germany, in the UK or in the vast and chaotic sprawl of the American K-12 market. Build here first, the logic goes, then move on.

Egmont and Cliff Hansen have, it turns out, been reading the map differently.

On Friday 29 May, Studentlitteratur, Sweden’s largest educational publisher, home to more than 6,000 titles and with annual revenues of SEK 400 million, announced it will become part of the Danish publishing house Lindhardt & Ringhof, which is owned by Egmont (Link). The acquisition, subject to regulatory approval and completing this summer, brings Sweden into a group that already holds leading positions in Denmark through Lindhardt & Ringhof Education and in Norway through Cappelen Damm. For the first time, Egmont has meaningful educational publishing positions across three core Scandinavian markets simultaneously.

Studentlitteratur’s CEO Stefan Persson described the deal as the creation of “a strong Nordic player”. It is the kind of language that can feel formulaic in press releases. But in this case, the strategic logic is unusually clear.

At first glance, it looks like a classic consolidation play where a larger publisher is buying scale. But Cliff Hansen, Publishing Director of Lindhardt & Ringhof Education and the man who led the deal, sees something different happening beneath the surface. In an era when anyone can generate learning materials in seconds, the scarce commodity is no longer content itself. It is trust. And trust, as it turns out, is the one thing that cannot be acquired by pressing a button.

Publishing is the foundation of Lindhardt & Ringhof Education with Alinea (Denmark’s largest primary learning materials publisher) sitting alongside Praxis and Akademisk Forlag. Around that, Hansen has built an education services portfolio that extends well beyond learning materials. GoTutor, the group’s tutoring business, has grown into a substantial operation in Denmark and is now expanding into Norway, where conversations are underway with Cappelen Damm about a formalised cooperation.

When we speak, Cliff is candid about the weeks that preceded the announcement. "M&A processes tend to take a lot of energy," he says, "We are perhaps a bit tired. But we are very happy. That is a good place to be."

THE LONG WAY ROUND

Hansen’s path to running one of Scandinavia’s most significant education businesses is not an obvious one. He joined a Gyldendal subsidiary in the mid-1990s, spending fifteen years there before following a close colleague into Lindhardt & Ringhof in 2011. By 2013, a vacancy had opened leading the company’s education division. It was territory Hansen had never worked in professionally. He took the job and found, almost immediately, that it suited the way his mind works.

“If you are in the education part of the publishing industry, it is all about long-term planning,” he says. “You can see what is coming. You decide what you want to do, you plan it, you execute it — and if you have done it well, three years later you succeed.” The contrast with trade publishing is one he has clearly thought a lot about. “In trade publishing, you put out a new book every month. You start from scratch every time. And if you are lucky, it’s a good book and it sells well.”

His education background is in history and informatics, which has formed a longstanding habit of thinking carefully about what computers are actually for and how to make sense of them. When Cliff arrived at Lindhardt & Ringhof Education, it was trailing its competitors badly in digital. What followed was close to a complete restart. That culminated in 2022 with the acquisition of Clio, their largest Danish competitor, making Lindhardt & Ringhof Education the dominant force in compulsory education at a stroke.

It is worth pausing here. Because Clio is not only a company that Hansen bought. It is also the cautionary tale he quickly reaches for when explaining why organic entry into Sweden was never seriously considered. "Clio did try to enter Sweden and they put serious effort behind it," Hansen says. "They even had an owner with operational headquarters in Stockholm — Bonnier. So they had real local support behind them. And still they could not build the business."

The lesson was clear: Sweden could not simply be entered. It had to be understood. And the only credible way to acquire that understanding, quickly and at the right level of scale, was to buy a company that already had it. “We have great respect for Studentlitteratur’s local knowledge,” Hansen says. “And having the opportunity to acquire the company with the number one position lands us exactly where we want to be.”

THE NORDIC LOGIC

The ambition to move into Sweden had been building since around 2020, when Lindhardt & Ringhof Education had established firm footing in Denmark and was looking for what came next. Hansen describes the strategic rationale with a directness that leaves little room for ambiguity.

"Denmark, Sweden and Norway are three countries located close to each other, with similar educational systems, similar ways of teaching children and similar approaches to developing learning materials. So the case for joining forces across these three markets is not complicated. Together we can produce more content, produce it at higher quality, and build digital platforms that none of us could sustain alone."

That value is practical as much as strategic. But the last point connects directly to something Hansen is candid about in a way that others in his position might not be.

The Egmont model, as he describes it, is deliberately decentralised. The group will not attempt to run a single Nordic publisher with national adaptations. Each business will operate locally. “You tend to think that Sweden is just an extension to the Danish market,” he says, “but that is not true. There are lots of small variations that you really need to carefully understand if you want to succeed.”

Hansen contrasts this with the pan-European model pursued by Sanoma Learning, which has built educational publishing businesses from Helsinki to Lisbon. As he explains: “In our opinion, that model is more distant — in knowledge, in culture, in how you can collaborate — when I am in Helsinki and you are in Porto. It makes much more sense for us to work together in the Nordics.”

And so, for now at least, his focus is on making the three-market approach work. But as Hansen puts it, with a smile that suggests he has fielded the question before: “You won’t be seeing any press releases about us moving into Germany in the next few weeks!”

THE PENDULUM SWINGS BACK

No conversation with a senior educational publisher in Scandinavia right now can avoid the analogue vs. digital debate. Hansen does not sidestep it. What he says is more direct than you might expect and goes straight to the commercial logic behind everything else in this conversation.

“I believe that the digital agenda has been pushed too far, especially in Denmark,” he says. “We have lost the balance. Schools have become much too digital.” The pendulum, he believes, belongs closer to the middle. He’s not abandoning digital, but restoring a proportion that better serves teachers and students.

Then comes the harder admission. “The digital revenue streams at the moment are not growing as we would like. And when that’s the case, we need to join forces to be relevant in our digital development. We need to have more revenue to serve the development costs, which are, as you know, high.”

From a publisher running a significant digital business, that is a striking thing to say out loud. But it reframes the Studentlitteratur acquisition entirely. This is not only a growth story. It is a resilience story with consolidation as the rational response to a market in which digital revenues are softening and fixed development costs are not.

That pressure is coming from multiple directions simultaneously. Government policy across Sweden, Denmark and Norway is actively directing schools towards print. Teachers are therefore adjusting their approach. Not just in responding to policy signals but to their own professional instincts after years of being told digital was the answer. Parents across the region are also increasingly vocal about screen time. Hansen sees it all clearly. “It’s a discourse which is resonating in the teachers’ minds,” he says. “They’re thinking that things have become too digital and so are now looking for other ways to teach.”

His answer is not to retreat from digital but to rebuild the case for it on firmer ground. That means consolidation, patience and a very deliberate position on where AI fits in.

AI: THE EDITOR STAYS

Egmont has, for example, already built AI-assisted tools into its Danish and Norwegian primary school portals. Teachers can use an AI agent to generate variations of existing content, create supplemental materials and adapt resources for different classroom needs. The design principle is deliberate: the AI operates on top of their own curated content base, not as a general-purpose generator pointed at the open web.

“We have built a much higher certainty of relevance and quality into what the AI output would be,” Hansen explains, “while trying to build the same flexibility you’d find with Claude or ChatGPT.”

On whether AI could eventually allow a pan-Nordic publisher to produce localised content at scale, and thereby undermine the case for local teams, local knowledge and local acquisition, Cliff is unequivocal. The technology does not change the underlying business logic. “When we acquired Studentlitteratur, we believed that the business was still vital and strong. Of course. Otherwise we wouldn’t have done the deal.”

And the editor, he insists, is not going anywhere. “Everything starts with the author and the editor. And it ends with the editor. The content is reviewed and brought to the level of quality that we think has a compelling value proposition in the market in the age of AI.”

That comes with a one-word name. Trust. In a market where teachers can now generate a worksheet in thirty seconds, the question is not whether they can produce something. It is whether they and their students can rely on it. Many teachers, Hansen observes, are currently experimenting and finding the results uneven. “Some teachers are capable of creating something which works well in their classrooms. But many are not.” As AI-generated content enters classrooms at scale, schools will increasingly need ways to judge quality, accuracy and relevance. That need plays directly to publishers who can be held accountable for what they produce.

The institutional trust that Egmont, Lindhardt & Ringhof Education and other leading Nordic publishers have built across decades, markets and generations of teachers does not disappear in the age of AI. If anything, it becomes harder to replicate and therefore more valuable.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Hansen’s definition of success over the next two years is specific rather than aspirational. Studentlitteratur, he believes, is currently strongest in the compulsory school sector. He wants to see that strength extended further up the age groups. And he wants to create digital materials that don’t feel like an afterthought. "In Sweden, the market for standalone digital materials is very small. Schools tend to buy books, with the expectation that something digital comes with it. We want that digital element to stop feeling like an add-on. We want it to look excellent."

Beyond that, he is very clear and straightforward about what the immediate work actually involves. Of course, there are some financial synergies to capture. But what comes through most clearly is simpler than any of that. He wants to understand what he has bought.

“We are very keen to get to know each other better” he says. “We have had some meetings in this process, but we don’t, to be honest, know each other that well yet. We want to really look into their engine room. What is making the engine run? How do they do things? And how can we use our experience to improve things. We’ll be taking the best from both worlds.”

These sentiments usually appear after an acquisition. But the difference here is that Hansen has form. Lindhardt & Ringhof Education’s Danish business has been built through this kind of patient, careful accumulation. The engine room is not just a metaphor. From our conversation, it appears to be genuinely how he works.

Whether the model holds with shifting government policy, evolving AI tools and the continued pressure on digital revenues is the question the next few years will answer. But Cliff Hansen is not making predictions. He is making plans.

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