Such a position gives the state opportunities few other owners have.
Bram Timmermans
It is troubling to see how little of the state’s enormous dividend income goes to research and innovation
Norway needs to strengthen its capacity for innovation. An owner that controls one third of the Oslo Stock Exchange cannot leave that task to others.
The Government has just presented the State Ownership Report 2025. It tells a story whose scale is familiar to far too few. Relative to the size of the economy, Norway has one of the largest state ownership positions in the OECD.
The state is Norway’s largest business owner. It has direct ownership stakes in 68 companies, worth around NOK 1,300 billion, and owns about one third of the value of the Oslo Stock Exchange, according to the new report.
Such a position gives the state opportunities few other owners have. It controls vast assets, it has, in principle, an unlimited time horizon, and it can bear risks that almost no private actor can tolerate.
On paper, the state is therefore the ideal long-term owner. It should be a powerful engine for innovation, restructuring and new value creation.
In practice, the opposite is happening. The explanation lies in how the state exercises its ownership, and what it does with the dividends.
As an owner, the state is demanding. It expects the highest possible return, ambitious strategies and companies that lead the way in responsible business conduct. But a good long-term owner does not only make demands. It also takes responsibility for a company’s ability to adapt and renew itself, and therefore for its future. That means allowing capital to remain in the company and continue working there, instead of extracting it all. It means financing research and development even when the returns lie far ahead.
This is where the state falls short.
A private industrial owner usually has one objective: to build the company’s value over time. The state has many objectives at once. The same ownership is expected to generate returns, safeguard jobs, sustain regional communities, ensure preparedness and deliver on climate goals.
The long time horizon should have been the state’s great advantage.
Bram Timmermans
This leaves no clear direction around which a company can build a long-term strategy.
The long time horizon should have been the state’s great advantage. But those who manage the ownership answer to electoral cycles and annual budgets. It pays to extract the capital, not to let it keep working.
And that is exactly what the state does. In 2025, it took more than NOK 75 billion in dividends from the companies, in addition to NOK 44.5 billion from share buy-backs. There is nothing inherently wrong with an owner taking dividends. The decisive question is where the money goes.
The state’s dividends go straight into the national budget and are mixed with everything else. They finance health care, defence and roads, not more research, new technology or new companies.
Public research investment as a share of the economy has stood still.
Bram Timmermans
Dividends did fall from a record NOK 102 billion in 2024 to just over NOK 75 billion in 2025. Even so, they have more than doubled over the past ten years, from around NOK 30 billion in 2015, while public research expenditure as a share of the economy has stood still.
Large-scale, long-term ownership can be a strength for a country. But then the owner must use its power to build, not merely to harvest. Looking to our neighbours, that is precisely what we see. There, heavy, long-term ownership is not held by the state, but by industrial ownership environments such as the Wallenberg foundations in Sweden and the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark, which channel their returns directly into their countries’ innovation systems.
The question, then, is not whether the state should own, or how much it should own. The question is whether that ownership is being used to equip the Norwegian economy for the transition ahead. Today, it is not.
There are, however, concrete steps that would change this. The first is to allow more of the profits to remain in the companies, earmarked for research and development. The second is to channel a fixed share of the state’s ownership dividends into a dedicated fund for research and growth capital, managed at arm’s length.
It can continue to harvest from its ownership, or it can use it to build.
Bram Timmermans
That would allow part of the dividend income to work for the future.
And if the state nevertheless chooses to transfer all dividends into the Treasury, the least it can do is increase public research funding. Research investment should reflect the fact that the state is not a bystander in Norwegian business, but one of its very largest owners.
The state has built up one of the world’s largest ownership positions. The question is what it intends to use it for. Norway needs to strengthen its capacity for innovation, and an owner that controls one third of the Oslo Stock Exchange cannot leave that task to others. It can continue to harvest from its ownership, or it can use it to build.
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The op-ed was first published in Dagens Næringsliv June 18.