Sweden Exports Its Future to Vietnam, Runs Legacy at Home

Half of Swedish businesses operating in Vietnam are expanding their investments right now, with innovation and green tech at the top of the list. That is happening today, June 2026. Meanwhile, back in Sweden, a 330-year-old company is making Forbes headlines because it finally put robots on its factory floor. Forbes frames this as "disrupting itself." I call it showing up twenty years late and getting a participation trophy.

This is the uncomfortable truth about Swedish industry in 2026: we are funding digital transformation everywhere except in our own backyard. And the next wave of AI automation business disruption will not be built on the ERP upgrades gathering dust in Gothenburg. It will be built on the climate data, the manufacturing know-how, and the operational infrastructure that Sweden is handing to Southeast Asia on a silver plate.

The Vietnam Paradox: Innovation Abroad, Stagnation at Home

The numbers are hard to argue with. According to multiple reports out today, roughly half of Swedish companies in Vietnam plan to increase their investment, with a specific focus on innovation and green growth. These are not small bets. Swedish firms are building smart factories, deploying clean energy systems, and funding AI-driven supply chain optimization. In Vietnam.

I do not blame them. Vietnam offers speed, cost efficiency, a young and hungry workforce, and a regulatory environment that does not require three years of committee review before you can test a sensor on a production line. The business logic is sound.

But zoom out. Look at what is actually happening. Swedish industrial companies are taking their best ideas, their most forward-looking investment budgets, and their willingness to experiment, and deploying all of it 9,000 kilometers from home. Then they come back to Sweden, sit down in a boardroom in Gothenburg or Stockholm, and approve another round of incremental patches to an SAP system that was designed before smartphones existed.

This is not a technology problem. This is a leadership problem. And it is specific to the Swedish industrial mindset, which treats domestic operations as "stable" and foreign operations as "strategic." That distinction made sense in the 1990s. It is suicidal in 2026.

When "Disrupting Yourself" Means Doing What Everyone Else Did a Decade Ago

Let me be direct about the Forbes piece. A 330-year-old Swedish company deploying robots in its production line is not disruption. It is maintenance. Fanuc has been selling industrial robots since the 1970s. ABB, a company with Swedish roots, has been a global robotics leader for decades. The fact that a Swedish manufacturer deploying robots in 2026 is considered newsworthy tells you everything about the state of Swedish industrial modernization.

Compare this to what is happening in Shenzhen, where factories are running lights-out operations managed entirely by AI agents. Or to the mid-market manufacturers in the American Midwest who started deploying custom AI solutions for predictive maintenance three years ago because they could not afford to keep losing production hours.

Swedish industry has a self-congratulatory streak when it comes to technology. We invented Bluetooth. We built Spotify. We produced Skype. All true. All in the past. The current reality is that Swedish manufacturing, logistics, and heavy industry are running on aging infrastructure while telling themselves that "Swedish quality" and "long-term thinking" make up for the gap.

They do not.

The Climate Data Play Sweden Is Missing

Here is where it gets really painful. Vinnova is currently funding the MASSIV+ project, which aims to produce actionable climate data for Swedish industry and society. This is genuinely good work. Climate data, combined with manufacturing data, is one of the most valuable datasets in the world right now. If you can model emissions at the production-line level, tie that to supply chain logistics, and feed it into real-time optimization systems, you have something worth billions.

Sweden has this data. Sweden has the climate credibility. Sweden has the engineering talent.

And Sweden is funding the infrastructure to use this data. In Vietnam.

The green tech investments Swedish companies are making in Southeast Asia are not charity. They are strategic bets on future markets. Those companies are building the sensor networks, the data pipelines, and the operational systems that will eventually feed AI models trained on some of the best climate-manufacturing data on the planet. And that data will not belong to Sweden. It will belong to whoever controls the infrastructure it runs on.

At HEIMLANDR, we see this pattern constantly. Companies come to us wanting AI solutions for their Swedish operations, but their budgets, their executive attention, and their willingness to take risk are all pointed somewhere else. The domestic AI project gets a pilot budget. The Southeast Asian expansion gets a strategic investment round.

Sweden vs. the World: A Honest Comparison

Let me put this in context that goes beyond anecdote.

United States: The mid-market is being aggressively modernized. Not by the companies themselves, necessarily, but by the tools available. AI agent development has become so accessible that a 50-person manufacturer in Ohio can deploy autonomous quality inspection systems for the cost of one full-time employee. The tooling ecosystem is exploding. Projects like OpenHands, an open-source AI-driven development platform with nearly 78,000 GitHub stars, are making it possible for small teams to build and deploy AI systems that would have required an entire department two years ago.

China: The integration of AI into manufacturing is not optional. It is state-directed. Chinese factories are deploying AI-driven production optimization at a pace that makes European timelines look absurd. And they are doing it with domestically built models, on domestically controlled infrastructure.

Germany: Struggling with many of the same problems as Sweden, but with more urgency. Industrie 4.0 was the buzzword. The reality is messy, but at least the investment is happening domestically.

Sweden: We have the talent. We have the research. We have Vinnova and a functional innovation ecosystem. And we are using it to fund projects abroad while BCG publishes reports telling Nordic companies that transformation is now a survival imperative. Dagens Industri runs lists of "AI companies everyone is talking about." But talking is not building. And the companies on that list are mostly selling to international clients, not transforming Swedish industry from within.

From Jönköping, I see this clearly. We are a city built on manufacturing, logistics, and entrepreneurship. The companies here are solid, profitable, and cautious. That caution served them well for a long time. Now it is a liability.

The Microsoft Tax and the Mid-Market Squeeze

There is another angle to this that nobody in Swedish tech media wants to touch. Microsoft is raising enterprise costs again. For the large Swedish companies, this is an annoyance. A line item. For the mid-market companies that actually need to modernize, it is a chokepoint.

Swedish mid-market manufacturers, the ones with 100-500 employees, are overwhelmingly locked into Microsoft ecosystems. Their ERP runs on Dynamics. Their communication runs on Teams. Their cloud runs on Azure. Every price increase from Redmond is a direct tax on their ability to invest in actual innovation.

This is where I get opinionated, and I do not apologize for it. The path forward for Swedish mid-market industry is not another Azure add-on. It is not another Dynamics module. It is purpose-built, domain-specific AI and automation that sits on top of existing systems and actually changes how work gets done. AI agents that can handle procurement decisions. Computer vision systems that replace manual quality checks. Predictive models that turn maintenance from a cost center into a competitive advantage.

This does not require a three-year SAP migration. It requires someone willing to build the right thing and deploy it fast. We do rapid MVPs at HEIMLANDR specifically because Swedish industry cannot afford to wait for perfect. Perfect is what happens in the committee. Good enough, deployed, and learning is what happens on the factory floor.

Where This Goes: 2027-2030

Let me sketch the trajectory, because this is where decision-makers need to pay attention.

In the next 12-18 months: AI agents will move from experimental to operational in manufacturing. Not as science projects. As actual production systems that make decisions, flag anomalies, and optimize throughput without human intervention for routine tasks. The companies that have already deployed sensors and data pipelines will be first. Everyone else will be scrambling.

By 2028: The climate data layer will become a competitive requirement, not a nice-to-have. EU regulation, specifically the CSRD and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, will make real-time emissions tracking a baseline for doing business in Europe. The companies that built this infrastructure in Vietnam will have a working playbook. Swedish domestic operations that skipped this step will be retrofitting under pressure.

By 2030: As we move closer to something resembling artificial general intelligence, or at least dramatically more capable AI systems, the companies that own their own data infrastructure and have experience deploying AI operationally will have an enormous advantage. The ones still running on legacy systems will not be able to integrate these new capabilities at all. You cannot plug a superintelligent system into a 2015 ERP and expect magic. The foundation matters.

The regulatory gap: Swedish and EU regulators are not keeping up. The EU AI Act focuses heavily on risk classification and compliance paperwork. It does almost nothing to accelerate adoption in traditional industries. There is no equivalent of the Inflation Reduction Act driving AI deployment in European manufacturing. The policy is all about caution and none about speed. That might protect consumers. It will not protect Swedish industry from being outcompeted by faster-moving economies.

What to Look At

If you run a Swedish industrial company, or if you build software for one, here are the things I would point your attention to right now:

OpenHands (77,685 stars on GitHub). This is an AI-driven development platform that lets small teams build and deploy software at a speed that was previously impossible. If you are a mid-market company that thinks you cannot afford custom AI solutions, look at what is possible with tools like this. The barrier is not money. It is imagination.

RTK (63,716 stars). A CLI proxy written in Rust that reduces LLM token consumption by 60-90% on common dev commands. Single binary, zero dependencies. If you are deploying AI agents and worried about inference costs scaling out of control, this is the kind of infrastructure layer that matters. Practical. Efficient. No hype.

Daytona (72,401 stars). Secure, elastic infrastructure for running AI-generated code. As AI agent development accelerates and more code is being written by AI systems, you need sandboxed, secure execution environments. This is not optional if you are serious about deploying AI in production.

The MASSIV+ project from Vinnova. Regardless of what I said above about Sweden's investment priorities, this project matters. Actionable climate data for industry is a building block. If you are in Swedish manufacturing, get close to this project. Understand what data is being generated. Figure out how to use it before your competitors in Southeast Asia do.

The Bottom Line

Sweden is not behind because it lacks talent, capital, or ideas. Sweden is behind because its industrial leadership class treats domestic operations as finished products and foreign operations as the place where innovation happens. That mental model is breaking.

The AI automation business transformation that is coming, and it is coming fast, does not care about your 330-year heritage. It does not care about your Forbes feature. It cares about whether your systems can ingest data, learn from it, and act on it. Right now, too many Swedish factories cannot do that. Not because the technology does not exist. Because nobody with a budget and authority has decided to make it happen. Here. At home.

I build from Jönköping because I believe Sweden still has the raw ingredients to lead. But ingredients sitting in a pantry do not feed anyone. Someone has to cook. And right now, Swedish industry is sending all its best chefs to Vietnam.

Start building. Start here.

Fredrik Brunnberg is the CEO of HEIMLANDR.IO, building AI and software solutions from Jönköping, Sweden. This is the daily HEIMLANDR briefing. If you found this valuable, share it with someone who builds things.