Inspired by the success of the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company, it was set up to facilitate trade with India, China and the Far East, and its large wooden vessels sailing to the far side of the world generated enormous wealth for the region.<\/p>\n
Gothenburg remained a shipbuilding town right up to the 1980s. Today, though, it is a much changed place. Dubbed Sweden\u2019s \u201csecond city\u201d \u2013 a moniker that is resented locally \u2013 it is playing a key role in the country\u2019s efforts to dethrone Ireland as the Silicon Valley of Europe.<\/p>\n
The region has shown stronger economic growth than any other metropolitan area since the height of the financial crisis, particularly in manufacturing, life sciences and knowledge-intensive services. More than 36,000 new companies have been established there since 2009.<\/p>\n
While Ireland enjoys a favourable corporate tax rate of 12.5 per cent, Sweden\u2019s has been steadily declining for years and currently stands at 20.6 per cent with rumours abounding that it will be cut to 20 per cent in the next budget.<\/p>\n
Gothenburg has welcomed about 170,000 new residents since 2009, some of whom came from Ireland. There are about 3,500 Irish people currently living in Sweden, and many of them moved there to set up businesses.<\/p>\n
Warren O\u2019Neill (40) from Limerick is one of them, living in the city for six years now. Having previously worked for Dublin-based energy trading company ElectroRoute, he came here because he believes it to be one of the best places to start a family \u2013 and a company.<\/p>\n
He is founder and chief executive of Nabla Analytics, a start-up that \u2013 among other things \u2013 uses advanced algorithms and software to forecast energy prices. But sitting in a coffee shop in the centre of the city, O\u2019Neill is downcast about his home country.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s been hard is listening to Irish radio and reading the news in Ireland because it seems like all the problems that existed when I was in college are still being talked about, or even worse,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought at the time it was as bad as it was going to get.<\/p>\n
![\"Warren](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/T5ZJ3MYKIFEKJAG7ZHMTWMCXYA.jpg\")
Warren O’Neill from Limerick is chief executive of Nabla Analytics <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to move back. I love Ireland and the culture, but they are not giving us many reasons to at the moment. Housing<\/a> is much more affordable here and the quality of property is much better too. The standard of childcare is far superior as well.\u201d<\/p>\n All employers in Sweden pay social security contributions for their staff, covering pensions, healthcare and other social benefits, amounting to a total of 31.4 per cent.<\/p>\n Nabla Analytics is focused on the Irish energy market and counts many of the bigger energy companies operating in Ireland among its customers, as well as companies in Denmark, England and Germany.<\/p>\n \u201cThey use our product to get more value for their wind farm or if they are supplying energy to businesses and want to get the best price they can,\u201d O\u2019Neill says. \u201cOur forecast helps them do that.\u201d<\/p>\n Bootstrapped at the start, the company has since had some investment from an incubator in Stockholm, but is mostly funded through its customers. \u201cWe\u2019re stable, we\u2019re profitable and we\u2019re growing every year,\u201d O\u2019Neill says.<\/p>\n \u201cThis year our revenue will be about \u20ac200,000. We\u2019re only two people so we\u2019re still a start-up, but it\u2019s more than enough to cover our costs. We\u2019re hoping for even bigger numbers next year. <\/p>\n \u201cWe have been considering fundraising so we can take on more people and grow even faster, but we haven\u2019t decided yet. We need more tech people and data scientists. We want to give ourselves more time to develop our products.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Neill insists Sweden is a far preferable location to set up a company than Ireland. \u201cSweden has been championed as the Silicon Valley of Europe,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was Dublin for a while, but there are a lot of artificial intelligence [AI] companies here now and there is a lot of momentum here.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything is digitised, so it was so easy to navigate, even as someone who had limited Swedish when I moved here. In other ways it would have been better for my business to be set up in Ireland because I would have closer connections with customers.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Neill points to Swedish success stories such as Spotify<\/a> and Ikea<\/a> as examples of the country\u2019s ability to take a simple idea and scale big.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Ireland, we have a bit of a little brother syndrome,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople here seem to be better at thinking big from the very start. Maybe that\u2019s because they\u2019ve had some international successes like Ikea and Spotify.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve also heard that because they have a really good welfare system here, people feel like they can fail and they will still be okay. They can quit their job to set up a start-up and there will be a safety net there.\u201d<\/p>\n O\u2019Neill also advocates that Ireland should be channelling funding to home-grown enterprise rather than giving tax breaks to big multinationals, particularly when faced with the threat of Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s tariffs<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel Sweden has done that a lot better than Ireland,\u201d he says. \u201cTake one of the big successes of Ireland in the Collison brothers [who founded payments giant Stripe]. They had to leave the country to grow big.<\/p>\n \u201cI was really optimistic when Ireland kind of built back after the recession, but I feel like now we\u2019ve made the same mistakes all over again. Ireland hasn\u2019t capitalised on the success we\u2019ve had.<\/p>\n \u201cThings like housing are stopping international talent from wanting to move to Ireland. I know people who have been offered jobs in Ireland, then gone to look up where they were going to live and how much it cost, and had to reject the offer they had already accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n With Dublin currently the subject of a de facto moratorium on new data centres<\/a>, many Irish companies have established a strong presence building these facilities in the Nordics, with hundreds of Irish workers on Swedish sites at any given time.<\/p>\n O\u2019Neill believes it is no surprise the Nordic countries have begun to overtake Ireland in the data centre space \u2013 seen as a key component in the harnessing of the AI boom. \u201cWe have the highest energy prices in western Europe,\u201d he points out. <\/p>\n \u201cWe have loads of issues on our grid. So it makes sense a country like Sweden, which has a better grid, has nuclear, has hydro and has lots of interconnection with other countries, would be more of a centre for the data centre business.\u201d<\/p>\n Iris \u00d6hrn, investment adviser for life science with Business Region Gothenburg, travelled to Ireland late last year with a delegation of Swedish companies and met officials including Department of Health secretary general Robert Watt<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the things they wanted to know and learn from Sweden was the way we are working with digitalisation within the healthcare and life science sectors,\u201d \u00d6hrn says. \u201cSweden is ahead there. Everything is digitalised here. There is no paper at all.<\/p>\n \u201cThe difference in Ireland is the public health sector is huge and digitalisation is not that much. Here, that aspect is very strong. Even companies like AstraZeneca that are pharmaceuticals are using lot of digital solutions \u2013 AI, quantum, etc \u2013 for drug discovery and delivery.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you compare the sector here with Ireland, we don\u2019t have so much manufacturing of life science because the market is small and we don\u2019t have the incentives you have. But we have a lot of research and development here, and it\u2019s a good country for testing and piloting things.\u201d<\/p>\n US multinational Thermo Fisher Scientific, which has a significant presence in Cork and Dublin, is establishing a new bioanalytical services centre in Gothenburg\u2019s GoCo Health Innovation City, a 200,000sq m life science facility designed to attract the best researchers and entrepreneurs around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cI think they chose to have this service in Sweden because of the collaboration they have with AstraZeneca, and because the life sciences sector here is very concentrated in a small area,\u201d \u00d6hrn says. \u201cYou have private and public hospitals, big and small companies, all in a limited area.<\/p>\n \u201cThat makes it easy to scale, network and share knowledge. Something that is very common here is the way companies collaborate. People will always talk about what they are doing with other groups.\u201d<\/p>\n But does that level of collaboration not have an impact on the bottom lines of companies which are ultimately in competition with one another?<\/p>\n \u201cWe have asked, and they say no, because, first, they choose what to share,\u201d she says. \u201cThey don\u2019t share everything. The collaboration is at a very early R&D stage. It\u2019s a test bed. They stop when it becomes business critical. There is even inter-sector collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n Christian Borg, spokesman for Business Region Gothenburg, describes this as \u201cdifferent sectors working for the same thing\u201d, and puts forward Volvo<\/a> \u2013 which has set up an office in the GoCo facility \u2013 as an example of an intersection between the car and life science industries.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have technology where there are lots of sensors within the car that can monitor the driver\u2019s health,\u201d he says. \u201cIf your heart is not beating normally, the car won\u2019t drive. It can also look at the driver\u2019s eyes and ascertain if the driver has drugs or alcohol in their system.\u201d<\/p>\n Anna-Lena Johansson, head of competence management at Business Region Gothenburg, says collaboration such as this has been the key factor in transforming the region from its shipbuilding roots to what it is today. \u201cIt has taken decades to do that,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n \u201cWe create these ecosystems around large companies that set up here. Ericsson was one of the first. Political stability also helps, and we have had politicians with big visions who were in power for long enough to execute them.\u201d<\/p>\n Bronwyn Brophy (51) from Malahide, Dublin, is chief executive of Vitrolife, which is also based in the GoCo facility. The company is listed on the Nasdaq Stockholm and is a global leader in in-vitro fertilisation<\/a> (IVF) treatment.<\/p>\n It generates revenue in the region of \u20ac380 million per annum and employs just under 1,200 people. It has facilities in Gothenburg, Valencia, Denver, Miami and Tokyo. <\/p>\n Brophy has been living in Sweden for five years. She moved to Gothenburg in the summer of 2023 having been headhunted for the top job at Vitrolife, having previously worked for Thermo Fisher Scientific.<\/p>\n The reproductive health industry was one that was already close to her heart, having used some of Vitrolife\u2019s IVF products to get pregnant herself in 2012.<\/p>\n \u201cI did need help,\u201d she says. \u201cI had to go on my own fertility journey in Ireland in 2012. What I wouldn\u2019t have known at the time was that some of the products and technologies in our portfolio are in clinics all over Ireland and around the world.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are one of the largest IVF companies in the world. We are the market leaders in Europe. We have a very strong position in Asia Pacific and we are now growing rapidly in North America, which is our biggest opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n She describes Sweden as \u201ca really efficient, very well run country\u201d with \u201cexcellent healthcare, free childcare\u201d and a \u201cvery good quality\u201d school system. \u201cTransport runs on time and is free for the kids going to school,\u201d she says. \u201cIt is a really easy country to live in.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a lot of attention now on Scandinavia and why the Scandinavian countries consistently rank as the happiest people in the world. There is a good work-life balance and a really strong sense of community.<\/p>\n \u201cThe tax rate is in line with the Irish tax rate and you get so much more in terms of public services. I think in terms of value for money, Sweden is a much better country to live in. Your taxes are the same and your services are significantly higher.<\/p>\n \u201cHistorically, the cost of living in Scandinavia would have been considered a lot higher than Ireland. I can tell you, when we go home, we don\u2019t find Dublin cheaper. Absolutely not.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/QPSWKYXMANEZFMMLW5FK7IMRCQ.jpg\")
The lobby of Volvo Group headquarters in Gothenburg <\/p>\n![\"Bronwyn](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/RULGXFAH7NEH3ATLP3AMZTYJ4Y.jpg\")
Bronwyn Brophy is chief executive of Vitrolife, a world-leading provider of medical devices and genetic services for the reproductive health industry <\/p>\n
![\"Jörgen](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/RQ5UMLB3FNAW5G4QLHHOSFDAQQ.jpg\")
J\u00f6rgen Sj\u00f6stedt, Volvo Trucks senior vice-president for Europe south and west, in the conference room of the group\u2019s headquarters <\/p>\n