About Sweden

Facts about Sweden

Land & people

Area: 450,000 sq km
Capital: Stockholm
Population (July 2005 est.):
9 million
Languages: Swedish and recognized minority languages such as Sami (Lapp), Finnish, Meankieli (Tornedalen Finnish), Yiddish, Romani Chib (a Gypsy language)
Per capita GDP (2005 est.): $29,600 (about Dh108,720)

Situated between Finland and Norway, Sweden borders the Baltic Sea, Gulf of Bothnia, Kattegat and Skagerrak. It is the third-largest country in Western Europe with an ever-varying coastline stretching for thousands of kilometres from Haparanda on the Finnish border, high up in the Gulf of Bothnia, all the way to Norway and the North Sea to the west.
Due to its long, narrow shape and northerly location, the Swedish landscape is highly diversified. There are majestic mountains and glaciers as well as wide-open countryside, interspersed by small idyllic villages and vibrant cities such as the capital ? Stockholm. The southern part of the country is noted for its variation and contrasts. Central Sweden enjoys the perfect balance between nature and culture. Here fertile plains and mystical forests provide a magnificent backdrop to rock carvings and manor houses. The central region is characterised by rolling hills, forests, lakes and folklore. The northern half of Sweden, with enormous forests, unregulated rivers, clean air and water, treats the visitor to powerful experiences. Administratively, the country is divided into 21 counties.

When to go

Sweden’s northerly position has a definite summer advantage in that temperatures are rarely extreme and humidity levels are not high. For sunshine lovers it’s ideal to visit the country between late May and late July, scooting out before the August rains.

Getting around

Daily domestic flights crisscross the country. For those who are not really pressed for time, the country offers an extensive bus and train network. Trains are the basis of Swedish transport outside cities, serving regional centres more quickly than buses. Train travel is ideal as you may need to cover long distances especially in northern Sweden. Buses are often the only option once you get off the beaten track. An extensive network of boats, vintage steamers and ferries link the country’s many lakes, islands and canals.

Where to stay

Accommodation in the country comes in all shapes and sizes. Plenty of excellent hotels in all price categories are available. If you prefer to stay in a more modest guesthouse, the range of choices is impressive.
Several other options are available for those who seek some fun and adventure: chill on a bed of ice or get a birds-eye view of life from a bed in a tree house. You can even spend some of your vacation time in an authentic 19th century prison to experience life behind bars. Or you can live in a monastery built in 1420.

Hassle-free travel
Most of the major air carriers offer services to Sweden. Most flights from North American and Asian centres fly through Denmark’s capital Copenhagen. The main international airport is Arlanda, about a half hour’s bus ride north of Stockholm.
If you are travelling from mainland Europe or Britain, you may choose to go by train or ferry. Buses and trains link up with ferries to provide services to and from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Germany, Poland, Estonia and the UK. Opening of the Oresund Bridge on July 1, 2000 has made non-stop travel between mainland Europe and Sweden a reality.

Waking up to Sweden dreams

Scandinavian style used to be synonymous with clean-lined, good-for-you design. But in the 21st century, Swedes are looking positively frisky.

At the Stockholm Furniture Fair in March, which drew fans from across Europe, designer Anna Kraitz turned heads with a floor lamp named Girl, which turns on at the tug of a long Rapunzelish braid.

In fact, edgy Swedish design turned up in Washington recently. Ten students from Stockholm’s Beckmans College of Design provided a private one-day showing of hip fashions and lively graphics on the bare concrete floor at the House of Sweden, which is under construction.

Cool Swedish modernism had given way to digital baroque. The display of “Brickworks: A Flat Exhibition” included a white porcelain bowl encased in a metal basket of cut-out flowers, which looked like an upside-down crown. On a poster worthy of MTV, lime-green Viking ships crossed a sea of Swedish alphabet soup made of three letters that don’t exist in English.

Glossy mock fashion advertisements included one with a model in a white quilted jacket sprawled on the ground and doused with chocolate. According to Els-Marie Lioberg, who designed the togs, that’s what could happen if you spent the night in a shopping mall.
The land of the midnight sun has segued into a fantasy of midnight chocolate. “The average Swede really enjoys good design,” says Claes Thorson, embassy spokesman, who was passing out bottles of Ramlosa mineral water. “Design is not only very important for Swedes. It’s important for all of us,” he says.

The point of the event was to announce that in September, when the House of Sweden on the Potomac is complete, Swedish design will be omnipresent.

The high-profile, glass-walled box here already makes a statement. Designed by Gert Wingardh, the building will shelter diplomatic functions and corporate apartments (Volvo, Saab and the president of International Finance Corp. will get the best views from the top floor). Nearly a-third of the building has been set aside for public activities including exhibitions, which Swedish Ambassador to the United States, Gunnar Lund, hopes will keep the embassy from becoming “a fortress.”

The embassy has scheduled a calendar of shows, starting with design and architecture. The students served as the vanguard of what Lund calls “a whiff of modern Sweden.” Next up is a model apartment filled with the everyday necessities of a design-obsessed nation.
Thorson promises more than an Ikea shopping expedition. One would hope for polished designs by the likes of Thomas Sandell and the firm of Claesson Koivisto Rune. A return visit from Kraitz, the designer of the braid-operated lamp, would also be welcome. She was last in Washington for the 2004 exhibition “Nordic Cool: Hot Women Designers” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Additional exhibits will explain Wingardh’s architecture, show off the distinctive design materials found on the island of Gotland and expose avant-garde fashion inspired by environmental concerns, from global warming to clean air.

While anticipating what wearables might emerge from a fashion designer moved by melting ice caps, design fans can head to the Finnish Embassy to see what contemporary architects can make from birch and pine trees.

An exhibit of wood buildings now on view shows how spectacular modern design is achieved with age-old materials. “From Wood to Architecture” includes airy houses perched at water’s edge and a preschool as cheerful as a toy box. Chapels, offices and an artist’s studio share the same affinity for simplicity and nature without falling into rusticity.

Over the past decade, the Finnish Embassy has raised its profile, as Sweden hopes to do, through superb design shows introducing past masters such as Alvar Aalto, as well as youthful innovators from across Scandinavia. It helps that designers from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland have provided some of the most exciting innovations in glass, furniture, jewellery, fashion and textiles of the past 100 years.

High-tech materials

The current exhibit was created by the Museum of Finnish Architecture for display at the 2004 Venice Biennale. At this world’s fair of architecture, the cutting-edge is more defined by high-tech materials and avant-garde forms. For instance, the American pavilion featured apartment towers by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald, with plastic living pods formed like molecular structures.
In Finland, where trees cover two-thirds of the land, architects create equally fantastic environment by letting wood flow up the walls and curve into staircases.

The material is not problem-free. “Unless wood architecture is honest, its use-life will remain brief,” says Roy Manttari, curator of the Museum of Finnish Architecture. But that’s what makes wood so human.

It’s little wonder that the deceptively simple and universally elegant structures won critical acclaim in Venice.

Humankind’s relationship with trees remains as fresh as the nearest stand of birch, or so it seems, standing in the glass-walled aerie that looks out over Rock Creek Park here.

“Wood is a very important material,” says an admiring Thorson, the Swedish Embassy spokesman, who notes that his nation is also two-thirds covered with trees.

Which country is the leading edge of design? “I can’t answer you on that one,” he says. “The Finns are so fantastic. We learn a lot from each other.

Natural bounty

Climate, geography and protective legislation team up to provide abundance of nature’s best.

One of Sweden’s foremost natural assets is fresh water. The groundwater deep in the bedrock dates back to the Ice Age. The glaciers in the north-west hold enormous volumes of water, as do the extensive wetlands. The largest reservoirs, however, are the numerous lakes — around 100,000 of them.

Powerful rivers also run through the country and mostly flow into the Baltic, the largest brackish sea in the world. Many of these rivers drive turbines that provide electric power. Sweden´s water is not only unusually abundant, it is also unusually clean. High-quality drinking water requiring only minor purification can be taken directly from the lakes.

A benign act of providence has endowed the country with considerable natural assets. Sweden’s forests appear endless. This partly due to the frost in the ground, which ensures that both the groundwater and humus layer remain on the surface so new shoots can always sprout.

Wood products

Since many harmful insects and micro-organisms cannot survive the harsh cold of a Swedish winter, there is less need for chemicals than in southerly climes. All this provides conditions for a high-quality forest industry. Swedish wood products, processed to varying degrees, are in high demand. The same is true for the berries and mushrooms that grow wild in the country’s forests.

More than one tenth of the land area of Sweden is under cultivation. Farming conditions vary in this long country. In the south the growing period is nearly 100 days longer than in the north. Throughout the country the climate only permits a single harvest. In the winter months the Swedish soil is allowed to rest and recover, mostly under a protective covering of snow.

Cultivation of pasture

A sparse population, a favourable climate and wealth of fresh groundwater dating back to the Ice Age, all help to make Swedish countryside unusually clean. Swedish legislation is extremely strict when it comes to growing crops and raising animals. The use of chemical pesticides and artificial fertilisers has been reduced by 70 per cent the past ten years, and antibiotics may only be given to farm animals in the event of diseases.

Barley, wheat, rye and oats are growing in Sweden, as well as oilseed rape, potatoes and sugar beet. The cultivation of pasture dominates the north. Some of the most fertile fields in the world are found in southern Sweden.

In the 1980s, there was popular and political demand for animals to be given the right to humane treatment during breeding and rearing. Astrid Lindgren, the famous Swedish writer of children’s books, was a significant spokeswoman for this movement.

Among other things a new Animal Protection Act was passed, regarded as among the strictest in the world. The act safeguards the natural way of life animals need, specifying minimum space and that breeding and slaughter must be conducted under dignified conditions.

Another law prohibits the use of antibiotics in feed, stating they may only be used when prescribed by a vet. When this law came into effect, many people complained. Today the Swedes are proud of it. The animals on the country’s farms have become healthier. Salmonella is almost non-existent in Swedish food. Consumers, both in Sweden and abroad, have become more aware of the chain along which food travels to the shops and are making their demands felt.

A Swedish sow is entitled to a certain number of square metres. Her piglets are entitled to straw to root around in and can stay with the sow up to a certain age. Docking their tails is forbidden. Similar regulations also safeguard the right of cattle to a life with a low level of stress. The rules say that dairy cows must be put out to pasture for at least two months of the year.

Swedish chicken farming has earned international recognition for its high quality and advanced anti-salmonella control programme. Research has become increasingly convinced of the sensory effects of stress.

More and more consumers are noticing this. They find that an animal that has lived a natural life, and been slaughtered in a dignified environment and animal health are profitable
for the breeder, which many people previously doubted.

Victory for the land of Vikings

Growth continues amidst environmental troubles and the slowdown in many world economies.

Boasting a highly industrialised economy, Sweden is also known as a neutral and peace-loving nation. Timber, hydropower and iron ore constitute the resource base of the country’s economy, which relies heavily on foreign trade. The main industries that make up the economy include automobiles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and forestry.

Sweden is also regarded as one of the most environmentally responsible nations in the world. A report published by Germanwatch, a German NGO that monitors German and European politics on development, environment and economics said: “If there is a paradise for environmentalists, this Nordic nation of 9.2 million people must be it. In 2007 Sweden topped the list of countries that did the most to save the planet – for the second year running.”

With finance minister Anders Borg recently revising the GDP figures, Sweden’s economy is showing signs of being affected by the global recession. Borg pegged the new forecast for Sweden’s GDP growth in 2008 at 2.1 per cent (earlier 3.2 per cent) and for 2009 at 1.8 per cent (earlier 2.5 per cent). These figures show a lower growth than expected because 52 per cent of Swedish GDP is based on exports.

“According to our national economic calculations, the Swedish exports of products and services increased by 6.2 per cent in volume during 2007. The Swedish Trade Council forecast for 2008 sees an increase by four per cent in volume for exports of products and services. Product exports have shown a strong increase during the first quarter of 2008 but the order intake for the rest of the year is dropping. We are evaluating the Middle East as the region which has the largest growth potential for Swedish exports in 2008, but all other growth regions will also show strong import demands. The largest export markets for Sweden in the region are industrial nations such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran, as most of the Swedish export products are engineering products used in industries,” says Daniel Mokari, Associate – Middle East and Africa, Swedish Trade Council.

According to a press release from the Swedish Ministry of Finance, the government’s 2008 spring fiscal policy bill is set to meet the challenges facing the country in both the short and long terms and to secure its future development and lead to permanently higher employment and GDP. The government policy will also improve conditions for knowledge in preschool and school, strengthen welfare provisions and put Sweden in a better position to meet the threat of climate change.

The impact of a policy for full employment and economic growth is steadily becoming more obvious. During 2007, the number of people excluded from employment fell by 121,000, the largest reduction in the close to 40 years that statistics have been available.

The international economy is increasingly dominated by turbulent financial markets. Since the budget bill last autumn, storm clouds have gathered and somewhat darkened, worsening the outlook for growth. The Swedish economy is expected to grow by an average of 2.3 per cent between 2008 and 2011. The government’s assessment is that the target of a one per cent surplus in net lending will be exceeded by a broad margin in the coming years. Both actual and structural net lending are expected to show average surpluses of more than three per cent of GDP between 2008 and 2011. The national debt continues to diminish and is expected to be 15.3 per cent of GDP in 2011.

According to an article by Cari Simmons on www.sweden.se, Sweden’s official website, Swedish make-up companies have moved beyond their home territory to capture loyal customers. Face Stockholm, Oriflame, IsaDora and Make Up Store are some of the brands that are being applied to faces from Moscow to Sydney. Mika Liias, president of the Make Up Store, recently told Swedish business daily Dagens Industri that “Swedish beauty sells.” His company opens about four stores a month, and operates in 20 countries.

Oriflame, which sells cosmetics through catalogue and direct sales, racked up sales of $1.4 billion (Dh5.14 billion) in 2006; IsaDora cosmetics are distributed in the US by
market-leading pharmacy retailer Walgreens; and Face Stockholm has a lengthy who’s who of customers, from Britney Spears to Bette Midler.

Although Swedish beauty certainly sells, that’s only part of the story. Christina Mattsson of KTF, the Swedish Cosmetic, Toiletry and Detergent Association, says: “Swedish products are popular because people associate them with a high level of competence. Our cosmetic companies work according to tough regulations and standards, and people trust Swedish products. We also have a long tradition of producing and selling high-quality products with good retail role models like H&M and Ikea.”

Biotechnology and pharmaceuticals

A new market – men – is also emerging. Greta Sjobom of the Make Up Store says more men are buying cosmetics than ever before. “Most of them buy concealer, pluck their eyebrows and look after their skin with different products,” she says. And it is having an impact on sales. Between 1997 and 2006, the Swedish cosmetic and hygiene increased its sales from around $1.2 billion (Dh4.4 billion) to more than $18.6 billion (Dh68.3 billion). A healthy market for consumer products in general resulted in an estimated five to seven per cent increase in cosmetic sales for 2007. Mattsson sees no sign of that trend abating, so long as the economy remains stable.

A report published by the Swedish Institute on www.sweden.se, Sweden’s official website, says two main types of companies utilise classical or modern biotechnology: mature companies in traditional areas such as pharmaceuticals, food processing or pulp and paper.

In terms of revenues and number of employees, the pharmaceutical companies largely dominate the biotechnology-related industry in Sweden. However, the biotech industry is growing rapidly. Here, drug discovery and development is the clearly dominant sub-sector. It consists of numerous companies, some of them with origins in one of the two large pharmaceutical companies, AstraZeneca and Pharmacia Corporation (since 2003 part of American-based Pfizer).

The first commercial utilization of modern biotechnology in Sweden was based on technology from the US company Genentech, licensed by the Swedish company Kabi in 1978. Kabi merged with Pharmacia in 1990. Pharmacia later merged with two US companies, Upjohn and Monsanto, to form Pharmacia Corporation.

In 2003 Pfizer, another big pharmaceutical company from the US, acquired Pharmacia Corporation. The other major pharmaceutical company in Sweden, Astra (now AstraZeneca) started using recombinant DNA technology in the late 1980s.

The number of Swedish biotech companies has increased from 136 in 1997 to 213 in 2003. During the same period the number of employees more than doubled to a total of more than 8,600 according to data published by Vinnova (the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems) in 2005. The two pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Pfizer are also engaged in biotechnology activities. There are many biotech SME (small and medium enterprises) in this application sector, but also in such industries as food processing and agriculture.

During 2005, the industry employed about 22,000 people. More than 90 per cent of its sales were exported, for a total of more than Swedish krona 46 billion or five per cent of Sweden’s overall exports. This gave Sweden a positive trade balance in pharmaceuticals amounting to 32 billion kronor (Dh19.9 billion).

The pharmaceutical industry is now dominated by one large multinational company – known today as AstraZeneca. Another company, Pharmacia, used to be a major player in the Swedish pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. However, following a series of mergers with US firms, a large proportion of the company’s activities in Sweden has been spun off or moved abroad.

The remaining parts of the previous Pharmacia are now owned by Pfizer and totally dedicated to prescribed pharmaceuticals. Aside from AstraZeneca and Pfizer, there are a large number of small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies with development and/or production in Sweden.

A report published on the European Automobile Manufacturers Association website lists Sweden as one of the countries in the world that are most highly dependent on the motor vehicle industry. Despite a population of only nine million, Sweden hosts two important carmakers in Volvo Cars and Saab Automobile and two of the world’s leading heavy truck and bus manufacturers – Volvo Group and Scania. In 2006, these two firms accounted for one fifth of the heavy trucks over 16 tonnes produced in the world.

Automobiles

Consequently, the motor vehicle industry is vital to employment, exports, investments, research and development, and the dissemination of knowledge in the country. It employs around 140,000 people and accounts for exports valued at 17 billion euros in 2006, which represents 14.5 per cent of Sweden’s total exports of goods and makes it the largest Swedish export industry. One fifth of the machinery and inventories investments and a quarter of the R&D investments of the entire Swedish manufacturing industry comes from the automotive sector.

The Swedish car market is down by 4.6 per cent (January to April, 2008 compared to 2007). Just a few years back, Volvo sold almost only petrol driven cars in Sweden, however, the registration of so-called environmentally friendly cars (i.e. flexifuel (ethanol), bi-fuel (methane gas) and hybrids) was up 103 per cent in April 2008 compared to April 2007.

The market share of these environmentally friendly cars is now 28 per cent. Volvo retains its market share (not segment share) just above 20 per cent. Interestingly, the amount of petrol-driven cars Volvo presently sells is 16 per cent, diesel driven Volvos stand at 50 per cent and flexifuel Volvos at 34 per cent.