Opportunities for new metal value chains in Sweden

For the past many years, Swedish manufacturing jobs has declined significantly. As in other western economies baring witness to the same trend, Swedish policy makers are developing strategies and looking for opportunities to reverse it. This has resulted in the Swedish government’s launch of a strategy for new industrialisation for Sweden, Smart industry.

Our report seeks to unlock hidden potentials for high value manufacturing jobs within classic Swedish strongholds with future growth potential.

The main conclusions of our study are:

• Sweden has a potential for developing thousands of new, high paying jobs driven by the expected strong growth in demand for energy storage and renewable energy technologies. In particular, we find that Sweden has many existing strongholds to build on for the production of e.g. lithium-ion batteries (used in e.g. electric vehicles) as well as special alloys and permanent magnets (used in e.g. windmills)
• Despite obvious business opportunities, battery or special alloy/magnet value chains may not develop on its own in Sweden due to high risk associated with investing in these relatively immature markets. In that case, the potential is never reaped to the detriment of the Swedish economy
• However, targeted non-distortive government interventions can address the market failures that create this extraordinary risk. If done diligently, the result may be that investors and companies alike grab the opportunities to develop several or all parts of the emerging battery and alloy/magnet value chains in Sweden. This will create high paying jobs and increase prosperity in Sweden. We recommend looking into a policy mix consisting of short, medium and long term risk reducing policies and initiatives.

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The study is commissioned by Tillväxtanalys