THE share price of Metro International, a Swedish publisher based in London, rose by 457% in the 12 months to March 11. It was a spectacular performance for a company that almost prides itself on the blandness of its newspapers and on the fact that they can be consumed from cover to cover by a commuter during an average journey time of 16.7 minutes.

March 11 was also the day that Metro, like all newspaper publishers, got the biggest news story of the year when Al-Qaeda detonated 10 bombs on Madrid trains.

Metro International and Al-Qaeda are two organisations with utterly different values and objectives. But they do have something in common — their “corporate” structure. In their own ways, they epitomise how the age of the internet and e-mail, outsourcing and offshoring, deregulation and globalisation is changing the rules of business and the nature of the modern corporation.

First, take Al-Qaeda, which, even more than Metro — let alone such icons of 21st century business as Google or Lastminute.com — provides the very organisational model of a modern corporation. It has a strong brand, a high-profile “chief executive” and a non-labour-intensive back office, implementing a global strategy by orchestrating and fronting (or, in the jargon, “white-labelling”) an international network of outsourced suppliers (assorted groups of Islamic militants), with the aid of mobile phones, the internet and fibre-optic communications.

Metro, meanwhile, publishes 34 local editions of its free newspaper and distributes them in 16 countries (though not, so far, Britain). The announcement in February of its first quarterly net profit as a public company, together with a growth rate of 40% last year in weak advertising markets, indicated that, after heavy investment, the company was proving the soundness of its non-traditional business model.

The company employs few reporters per edition compared with a traditional newspaper, preferring to buy most of its content from news and picture agencies and packaging it under the Metro label. It does not own its printing presses but outsources its printing, along with most of its distribution.

“It is a hollow corporation,” said Kjell Nordstrom, a Swedish business-school academic and co-author of Karaoke Capitalism, a new book on the changing nature of companies and business.

Metro International is just one example of a hollow company — one that is applying to the newspaper industry a business model already proven in, for example, the computer industry by Dell and in the furniture industry by Ikea. It operates, in effect, as a network orchestrator, buying the things that firms in its sector traditionally produced themselves.

“The boundary of the firm — the definition of what is inside or outside the company — has always moved back and forth,” said Nordstrom. “What is happening now is that the boundaries are moving more quickly; and they are moving in a particular direction, with companies shifting more and more activities out of the corporation.”

The result is that companies, both large and small, are performing ever fewer of their traditional functions and becoming “hollow”.

The change is being driven by politics and technology. The factors range from the liberalisation of international trade (the average level of tariffs in industrial countries is now less than a tenth of the level before the second world war) to the spread of personal computers, the internet and fibre-optic cables capable of transferring huge amounts of data at high speed and low cost. These factors have exposed companies to ever more global competition, putting ever more pressure on them to cut costs by outsourcing and offshoring, which have themselves become ever easier.

“A single, corporate model has dominated business life for some 100 years,” said Jonas Ridderstrale, Karaoke Capitalism’s other author. “The vertically integrated industrial company was the model. This was a corporation where most activities were carried out internally. The firm made what it sold.”

This traditional model is crumbling. IT in general, and the internet in particular, have ushered in a new age of information that has made markets more efficient and so shifted the advantage to those who play the markets most shrewdly.