Does Lyten see something everyone else has missed?

August 7, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 7th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The Northvolt bankruptcy estate is being bought up by the American company Lyten. The sale is a comeback — but it came at a high price.

Bankruptcy administrator Mikael Kubu has probably not had a particularly relaxing summer. After Northvolt went bankrupt in March this year, the work of trying to salvage parts of the battery company has been intense. In early July came the news that American Lyten would take over part of Northvolt’s Polish operations, Northvolt Dwa Ess. Now, just over a month later, they are also taking over the factory in Skellefteå, the development operations in Västerås and the partially built factory in Heide, in northern Germany.

The deal is a form of vindication, as many critics had argued that Northvolt’s bankruptcy was an example of a project that was misconceived from the start. That Lyten is opening its wallet in this way shows that there are more industry players who see value in what Northvolt intended to create.

Lyten’s CEO Dan Cook says in a press release that they will invest in “clean, locally produced batteries and energy storage systems in both North America and Europe.” They could have shortened that somewhat by writing “not Chinese,” because that is in practice the same thing in this context. But the hypothesis is similar to what we heard from Northvolt’s CEO and founder from the very beginning — there is demand for green batteries in the local area.

Whether Lyten is right in its analysis, and manages to deliver what Northvolt itself did not, remains to be seen. But it looks like fairly uncharted territory they are moving into. According to Lyten’s website, they have around 325 employees. Northvolt had, before the bankruptcy, around 5,000. They also write that they have previously secured funding of around 6 billion kronor. The corresponding figure for Northvolt was around 100 billion kronor.

So it is David buying Goliath here.

Which other interested parties looked at the bankruptcy estate, we do not currently know. Previously there had been big question marks around whether a Chinese owner might be conceivable and permitted to own an asset of this kind, but that scenario need not be tested now. Given the outcome, we can assume that Lyten appeared best placed and most realistic to complete the deal — valuing the assets at around 50 billion kronor according to the press release.

If it is a vindication for Northvolt, it came at a high price. Much of the staff has had to look for new jobs and customers were forced to find new suppliers. The brand has taken a serious hit. Many of the investors have attracted heavy criticism, and even if they possibly get a little money back in this deal, it is nowhere near the outcome they were hoping for. It is a fresh start — with all the difficulties and opportunities that come with it.

Was it only the circumstances that caused Northvolt to fail? An overly complex rollout of battery manufacturing combined with poor timing around financing in the later stages? Lyten at least seems to be making that assessment. But realistically, there is still some way to go before Northvolt can fulfil the vision they once sold to Skellefteå, Sweden and the world. Many things need to fall into place.

Bringing in new players who believe in these large-scale infrastructure projects has been a recurring theme throughout Northvolt’s history. Now we have a new one. Do they see something that everyone else has missed or misunderstood? Or will they join the line of those who have staked billions on a vision that has proved difficult to realise? Only time will tell. But finding believers has always been Northvolt’s strength.

Lyten has problems financing its acquisition of Northvolt. The deal was presented in August and the American company has still not secured the money needed, SvD has learned. Anxiety is growing in Skellefteå.

The rescue of the battery giant in the north hangs in the air.

Weeks have become months and months have almost turned into half a year without anything happening.

On 8 August, the deal was presented at a well-attended press conference to nothing but smiles: “This is a pivotal moment for Lyten,” said CEO Dan Cook. Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch also praised the deal and said that tears of sorrow had been replaced by a sigh of relief.

Today, more than five months later, people are still waiting for the final payment to be made.

First it was said the deal would close in October. Then that it would be completed in December. Now the bankruptcy administrator is talking about January.

SvD has been in contact with sources with insight into the deal and the message is clear: “Lyten has not managed to secure the financing. Not yet at least.”

The company needs to both borrow money from banks or financial institutions and bring in new capital from existing owners — something it has not managed to do. How much money Lyten is chasing is unclear; the size of the purchase price has never been made public.

Much else is also a question mark. The company has not published information about revenue and results and has also not been willing to state exactly which owners stand behind the operations.

What we know is that it is a private battery company founded in 2015 and based in California with just over 300 employees.

According to SvD’s sources, an intensive effort is now under way behind the scenes to find the right financiers. Perhaps the deal is only days away. Perhaps it will take considerably longer.

“A lot needs to fall into place to get the right investors on board. They are not exactly lining up outside Lyten’s door. The recent geopolitical drama has not helped the process either,” says a source with insight into the matter.

A few weeks before the big August press conference, the news agency Bloomberg published information that Lyten had raised around 2 billion kronor from existing investors to finance the acquisition of Northvolt’s Polish factory — but that is a deal that is separate from the one in Sweden. No corresponding information about the financing of the Northvolt acquisition in Skellefteå has been published.

Lyten’s problems are somewhat reminiscent of the green steel giant Stegra’s dilemma. There too, they are chasing more money, and there too it is going slowly, according to information that has leaked out.

Northvolt’s bankruptcy administrator Mikael Kubu is tight-lipped about Lyten’s financing problems: “That is not something I can comment on. However, I can note that since 1 November, Lyten has been paying wages for the staff and covering operating costs for the factory in Skellefteå,” he says.

But the factory is standing still. The roughly 170 employees are working only on maintenance — ensuring that machines and equipment do not collect dust while waiting for the factory to open properly, if or when the deal is completed.

Kubu often returns to the analogy of a property sale: that Lyten, when signing the contract in August, paid a deposit, and that they are now waiting for the final payment. Asked whether it is not his obligation as bankruptcy administrator to ensure that a serious financing arrangement is attached to a bid, he replies: “When the bid came, we made a joint assessment — in consultation with priority creditors, a bank consortium consisting of 17 banks along with Scania — that this was a reasonable bid given the conditions that existed at the time.”

A senior person in the venture capital industry, with extensive experience of acquisitions, takes the view that five months from contract signing to completion is a long time — especially when two deadlines have been missed. “I would probably say that the probability of the deal not going through is fairly high.”

In Skellefteå, questions are multiplying as the days pass without anything happening. “My God, people are extremely worried,” says Victoria Hart, a former Northvolt employee and union representative for IF Metall. “If the deal falls through it is a devastating blow for Skellefteå. Many foreign engineers and specialists will be forced to leave Sweden shortly. It is a race against the clock before the Migration Agency decides they have to get on a plane home.”

SvD has contacted Lyten, which declines to comment on the ongoing financing process. The company instead refers to a statement from marketing director Keith Norman: “This is a complex acquisition and we are eager to complete it as quickly as possible. We have from the outset been optimistic about the timeline for getting everything in place. Some parts are taking longer than expected, but overall the acquisition is progressing according to plan.”

Meta found the answer others are searching for

July 16, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on July 16th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

After investments of hundreds of billions, Meta has now found how to make money from AI. Don’t count on any superintelligence to get there — the answer lies considerably closer than that.

600 billion kronor. That is how much money Meta is expected to invest in chips, computing capacity and data centres in order to develop AI services this year. That figure likely does not include the more than 130 billion kronor they just invested in the AI company Scale AI.

To put it in perspective, the investment is a little under three times the entire market value of Ericsson. And this is, as noted, only for 2025.

Many are now asking what these gigantic bets will actually lead to, and whether there are better ways for Meta to allocate this money. Explanations have been somewhat thin on the ground. Until now.

It is about advertising. That may not sound particularly exciting given competitors like Google’s DeepMind, which mapped protein structures for the first time ever in 2021. But if you look at Meta’s revenue breakdown — despite its big investments in VR glasses and the like — the answer comes quite easily. 97 percent of Meta’s revenues in 2024 came from advertising. Improving them is therefore the quickest way to start earning a return on the large investments being made.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the idea is to move away from ready-made ads created by the advertiser, and instead hand that assignment over to AI. In practice, companies would no longer provide or create specific ads. Instead they list what they want to achieve and how much money they are willing to spend.

With that information, Meta’s AI system would create new ads presented to potential customers. But since the ads are generated at each impression, they can become very specific. Do you live somewhere sunny? A convertible is suggested. Are you in Sweden in winter — something with a heated steering wheel.

This development is a couple of steps away from what happens today. Including real-time data in ads is something advertising agencies have been able to do for a long time. What is radical about what Meta is proposing is that it would potentially bypass advertising and media agencies entirely. Their job includes advising on messaging, method and effectiveness measurement. If Meta gets what it wants, it can take over that entire assignment itself.

That companies like Volvo or Volkswagen would hand their advertising messages over to an AI system is, however, unlikely in the short term. The risks for brands of that calibre are still too high.

So it is likely the smaller advertisers who will be most attracted by this. That can go a long way. A 2022 study showed that small and medium-sized advertisers accounted for 61 percent of all ads on Meta’s advertising platform. If they can avoid the costs of various advisers, they can allocate their entire marketing budget to Meta instead.

Meta’s initiative points towards a considerably less grand and exciting future for AI development, at least in the near term. The debate has to a large extent been about what happens if — or when — we reach what is called AGI, artificial general intelligence.

This major step happens when AI systems are smarter and more capable than humans, and has been painted both as a doomsday scenario and as a salvation for the world. It is also precisely that polarisation which has made so many people anxious about where AI development is heading. It quickly becomes an existential question for humanity.

Meta’s advertising bet is rather the opposite of that. But it can nonetheless make a large impact when it comes to efficiencies. Already today, Meta uses AI as an integrated part of many services without it being noticeable. This can involve recommendations of content or moderation of unsuitable material. But gradually the human oversight decreases and the algorithmic increases. The efficiencies will reasonably lead to the number of jobs decreasing — or at least to new ones not being created.

Billions upon billions are being poured into AI development right now. Great things have been promised — cures for serious diseases and solutions to the climate crisis. But here and now, it seems we are getting a small improvement to things we already have, and something we might have preferred to do without: marginally better advertising.

Mix builds green companies — others pay

July 5, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on July 5th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

With projects like Northvolt and Stegra, Harald Mix and his company Vargas have come under fire. The reason is a new kind of venture capital model — where the public’s contribution is high, but Vargas’s own is low.

With companies like EQT and Nordic Capital, venture capital has almost become a signature strength for Sweden.

In theory, the model is deceptively simple. Buy a company cheaply, improve all the numbers — then sell, or list it on the stock market, at a high price. In practice it is somewhat more complicated.

SvD’s investigation of Harald Mix shows how many companies, pension funds and communities around his investment in Northvolt have been affected.

But Mix himself has escaped the worst of the blow. The reason is a new kind of venture capital model that his investment company Vargas has created.

Vargas calls itself an “impact company builder” — a creator of companies. That is unusual in these circles. Normally this category of company deals with financing businesses that already exist but are facing major expansion or change. Vargas starts earlier than that.

The list of company names where they are involved is well known: Northvolt, Stegra, Aira, Syre and Polarium. They have much in common. All involve green industry in various ways — a sector that has had strong tailwinds in recent years.

That factor is central. Because while Vargas is involved in starting companies, they are not alone in financing them. On the contrary. A long list of pension funds, banks and export credit agencies participate in various forms of financing. The Swedish National Debt Office issued a so-called “green credit guarantee” to Stegra in December 2023. This covers 80 percent of a loan of around 13 billion kronor that Stegra has taken. For Northvolt, the AP funds joined together and created a new company just to be able to invest.

Proximity to abundant renewable and comparatively cheap electricity is a recurring theme. When Harald Mix appeared on Ekot’s Saturday interview in November 2023, he pressed hard on the fact that Stegra — then known as H2 Green Steel — would enjoy major competitive advantages over similar projects in Europe, largely because of lower electricity prices.

Scale is another similarity. When the textile recycler Syre was launched, the plan was to build twelve factories within eight years — several of them simultaneously. This resembles the same method that Northvolt used, and which has been heavily criticised. Before the factory Northvolt Ett in Skellefteå was working properly, massive projects had been launched in, among other places, Heide in northern Germany and in Quebec, Canada.

The purpose of scaling up quickly is straightforward. If it works, you increase the company’s value substantially. A company with twelve factories is worth more than one with a single one — even if all twelve factories have not been built, or even started. If it does not work, however, the crash is all the more spectacular, as in the case of Northvolt.

Overall, these are large, green and ambitious ideas, which are readily co-financed with a broad palette of public stakeholders. Loans can be secured with credit guarantees of various kinds, and customer agreements for products are used as the basis for new investments — even if the products in question do not necessarily exist yet.

In these kinds of contexts one usually talks about “risk/reward” — that is, what risk an investor is willing to take in relation to the return a bet can yield. The theory says they should balance each other reasonably well: high risk can yield high return, and vice versa.

When it comes to Vargas’s companies, one can clearly see what the “reward” could be, but the risk seems more modest. The reason is the structure Vargas works with. It gives a great deal in return for the money invested. You rarely get more shares than when you are involved in founding a company.

In the case of Northvolt, Harald Mix had invested around 175 million kronor via Vargas and his personal holding company Kallskär. That may sound like a lot of money. But it is only around 0.18 percent of the roughly 100 billion kronor that Northvolt secured in financing in various ways. For that, Vargas became the company’s third-largest shareholder.

Compare that with the eighth-largest shareholder on the list — the four joint AP funds. They owned only half as many shares as Vargas, but had invested a full 5.8 billion kronor — fully 33 times more.

That it becomes more expensive to invest at later stages in companies is standard. The premium you pay should be balanced by the fact that the risk to the overall project is lower. Vargas’s model of quickly scaling up, however, reduces that gap — and in the case of Northvolt, the risk was hardly lower.

Vargas lost a great deal of money in Northvolt’s bankruptcy. The AP funds, and ultimately Sweden’s pensioners, lost enormously more.

It is beginning to resemble a new type of venture capital model — one where Vargas can win big, but its potential loss stays relatively small.

But as the bankruptcy of Northvolt shows, that equation does not hold for all participants. And when the co-financiers are our shared pension money, Vargas’s model tastes particularly bitter.

Swedish tech’s revenge — outperforming the US

June 28, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 28th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

While trade tariffs and uncertainty have shaken the world’s stock markets, one star is shining unexpectedly brightly. Swedish tech companies have outperformed the US in 2025 — with one particularly strong locomotive.

How are Swedish tech companies actually faring? Despite endless PR campaigns about their excellence compared to other countries, the question is surprisingly difficult to answer. But there are actually facts on the matter, at least when it comes to Swedish tech companies on the stock market.

In June 2024, SvD launched its own index for this category. At the time, the Swedish tech stock market looked to be in crisis. Looking at the picture since the start of this year, things look completely different. Swedish tech is heading for a comeback. And at the very front of the pack we find a company that is outperforming Nvidia, Microsoft and Google alike.

“I don’t think anything we see today changes the long-term picture for Spotify. The business is stable, our business model holds, and the direction we’re heading in remains clear. People still want to listen to music.”

Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, sounded triumphant when he reported strong results in April this year. The music service showed its largest subscriber growth in five years. And similar notes have been heard from the major Swedish tech company for a long time.

The result on the stock market now speaks for itself. Since the start of 2025, Spotify’s share price has risen by around 69 percent (data from 2 January to 25 June this year). The corresponding figure for Nvidia — admittedly from a considerably higher starting point — is 12 percent.

With Spotify as locomotive, the entire Swedish tech stock market has delivered very strong results. Someone who — hypothetically — invested in our tech index would have seen a return of just over 16 percent since the start of the year. That can be compared to the American S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, which have delivered only modest 4.5 and 6.3 percent respectively.

Looking at American tech companies, the comparison looks even better. The SKYY index, which primarily consists of various cloud companies, has actually fallen by 1.2 percent. The Swedish tech market has thus outperformed by over 17 percentage points this year.

One explanation for why this has happened is that Swedish tech companies are more insulated from the biggest trends. When AI exploded in the world, the Swedish tech stock market did not benefit significantly. But when scepticism has grown somewhat, they have not been hit either. They have been trotting along steadily while many American companies galloped — and were forced to slam the brakes.

Further down the list there are Swedish tech companies that illustrate this. The gaming company Betsson has risen by over 36 percent, and industry peer Kambi by around 32 percent. The financial services company Fortnox has also risen by around 23 percent, driven in that case by a takeover bid to delist the company from the stock exchange.

Not everything has the same lustre, however. Bottom of the table goes to the cybersecurity company Yubico, which has lost over 45 percent so far this year. The company, which came to market via a SPAC in autumn 2023, has had a tough year but has still risen considerably since its listing. The gaming company Embracer looks weak in the statistics, but that is mainly because it has separately listed Asmodee, which makes board games among other things. E-commerce company Boozt has also had a hard time, losing more than a third of its market value since the turn of the year.

As with most things on the stock market, different tendencies emerge depending on how you calculate. Swedish tech companies have on the whole had a very strong 2025 so far. But if we look back to the index’s starting point — January 2022 — the picture is completely different.

A hundred-kronor note invested in the Swedish tech market then would have become 74 kronor today. The enormous gains seen primarily at the largest American tech companies have been essentially absent. But from the bottom in November 2023, there has been a steady recovery. And the tariff chaos that has characterised international markets is barely visible for Swedish tech companies.

How is Swedish tech on the stock market in 2025? So far, well. Despite only 12 of the 30 included companies having risen since the turn of the year, the gains are so large that the overall picture looks positive. But it is primarily Daniel Ek who has performed well. Our index is equally weighted to give a more balanced picture of how the whole sector is doing. Had we instead weighted by market value, Spotify would have accounted for fully 74.6 percent of the Swedish tech market.

People still want to listen to music, said Ek in his quarterly report. Apparently people still want to own Spotify shares as well.

Creators are outraged — YouTube looks away

June 22, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 22nd, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Want to succeed on YouTube? It can pay to shock and be controversial. But a recent example shows how easily people can end up caught in the platform’s grey zones.

Every minute of every day, around 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. The Google-owned video service has become the Western world’s second-largest search engine. Who is actually watching all this material?

That question is difficult to answer. The differences between superstars who attract millions of views and home filmmakers with single-digit viewer counts are enormous.

What is easy to answer, however, is who is not watching all the video being uploaded — and that is YouTube itself. So who keeps track of what gets uploaded to the platform? Nobody. And that can have major consequences.

YouTube itself likes to talk about its automated systems that scan material for unsuitable content. And large numbers of videos are removed with the support of these systems — around 9.4 million video clips disappeared this way in the last quarter of 2024. But if the machine-learning systems are like a net, it is not a particularly fine-meshed one. A great deal of material that breaks YouTube’s rules gets published anyway.

There are many examples of this. In the documentary podcast Badfluence from SvD and Podme, 16 examples containing potential violations are sent to YouTube. The creators behind the videos are major figures on Swedish YouTube — Pontus “Anjo” Björlund, Alexander Rask and Christofer “Chrippa” Berg. YouTube is given just over a week to analyse the 16 videos. Shortly afterwards, one of them disappears, and another appears to have been edited. The accompanying comment from YouTube points to the company’s guidelines for what is and is not permitted on the platform. But the review only took place after SvD and Podme had shared the links.

YouTube’s policy resembles most closely a kind of public insurance policy. A document one can point to in order to justify removing and changing material when necessary. Because a policy is easy to write but difficult to uphold.

What emerges are two parallel worlds on YouTube — a set of rules that dictates what you are allowed to do, and millions of videos that have neither been filtered out nor reported by any viewer. In many cases, the two have very little to do with each other.

It goes without saying that the challenge for YouTube of keeping track of all this material is enormous. 500 hours of video per minute amounts to around 720,000 hours of new material to review — every day. How could that even be done? That it requires some form of automation is obvious. And that there will be shortcomings in these systems is equally so.

At the same time, the problem they are trying to manage is entirely of their own making. There are reasons why many other platforms do not allow people to freely upload whatever material they like to their services. Doing so quickly becomes a question of responsibility. Your platform, your responsibility, right?

That would be one way to see it, at least. In practice, YouTube has grown up in what is almost a lawless territory where regulation of tech companies has essentially not existed — particularly not in the service’s home country, the US. Within the EU, new legislative packages have been introduced, and in October 2024 YouTube received a formal inquiry about how content is recommended on the platform. A closely related area, but not identical. It is also worth noting that YouTube has existed for 20 years — and society has not progressed further than cautiously beginning to ask questions. There is something to be desired there.

YouTube’s incentives to change the situation are few. While they do not want material that is directly illegal on their service, the difficulties arise in the grey zones. In the Badfluence podcast one hears about a ruthless world where creators slander each other. The accusations that fly concern everything from various crimes to infidelity. Secretly recorded phone calls, text message conversations and censored nude images are shared. Inappropriate? Yes. Popular? Also yes. The algorithms that determine what viewers are shown favour what is controversial. And the more people who watch a particular clip, the more people may have it recommended to them.

Here we find the underlying problem. The more video views, the more money both YouTube and the creator earn. Being controversial therefore pays. The platform and the creators both feed and depend on each other. In such a scenario it is easy to understand why the grey zones have received lower priority.

Unfortunately, it is precisely in these grey zones that people get hurt. Private information is shared, people are violated, lies are spread. YouTube does not encourage creators to do this. But they do not do particularly much to stop them either.

Trump’s golden phone will likely still be made in China

June 17, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 17th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

While Donald Trump tries to get Apple to move iPhone factories to the US, his sons have created an American competitor. But is it even possible to manufacture mobile phones in the US?

A gold-coloured mobile phone, “made in America.”

That is the Trump Organization family company’s new promise ahead of the autumn. The phone is to be sold by the newly launched mobile operator Trump Mobile and is said to cost just under 5,000 kronor. According to the company, the phone, named the T1, will be “proudly designed and manufactured in the USA.”

Donald Trump has among other things criticised Apple for not moving iPhone production to the US. Now his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as those responsible for Trump Mobile, have the opportunity to show how it would be done. Many critical voices have been raised immediately, asking the obvious question: is it even possible at the moment?

The short answer is: probably not.

A more nuanced answer would be that it depends on how one defines the concept of “manufacturing.” That very question is also at the centre of Trump’s wish to bring more manufacturing industry back to the US. What is he actually referring to?

A mobile phone consists of a large number of different components — screen, memory, camera, battery and so on — which are then assembled to create the phone that is later sold in shops. The individual components are often made by subcontractors. Apple, for example, does not manufacture all its screens itself, but purchases them from companies like LG and Samsung. In that case, manufacturing happens in South Korea.

Looking at batteries, they often come from China, while the storage memory in an iPhone is manufactured in Japan. It is rather like a global construction kit where each part has its own origin.

Then there are the machines required to create each individual component. Dutch ASML, for example, sells lithography machines to Taiwan’s TSMC, which in turn makes processors.

What does “made in America” even mean when the supply chain for a mobile phone looks like this?

Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins business school, described the possibility of doing this in the US to the Wall Street Journal as follows:

“There is absolutely no way to manufacture the screen, source the memory, camera, battery, everything.”

He also added that it would take “at least five years” to set up anything similar in the US.

But let us take the most generous interpretation of the concept of “manufacturing.” We allow all the global subcontractors to stay where they are, but we assemble everything on American soil.

When the Wall Street Journal looked at exactly this scenario for the iPhone, they found that such a move would mean ten times higher costs for Apple. From 300 kronor to 3,000 kronor per phone. It is possible, but it becomes expensive. And that does not even include the cost of setting up this large-scale assembly operation in the US. Factories, machinery and staff are required to make it happen.

Trump’s promised phone is, however, not expensive. It is to cost less than half of what Apple’s latest iPhone costs, but contain components that in many cases are equivalent. The T1 phone is said to have a larger battery and more internal memory than the iPhone. And on top of that, be American.

In autumn, the gold-coloured phone is to go on sale, and only then will we know exactly who is behind each component. But a not particularly bold guess is that it is a Chinese phone at its core, with some minor steps completed on American soil. The Trump family may come to realise that what sounds good as a slogan — “made in America!” — does not always work equally well as a business strategy.

Apple’s silence spoke loudest of all

June 10, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 10th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Apple’s annual event showcased masses of news. But what made the biggest impression was what the company did not mention at all.

If Apple’s annual presentations once resembled a stage performance, they have now become fully Hollywoodified. For many years they were live — now it is a long advertisement film.

Perhaps it is the tech company’s ambitions in television production that have spilled over into the rest of the company? Or perhaps it is easier to conceal obvious holes in the story when the production is flawless. On Monday evening, it was time again.

No event in tech receives the same attention as Apple’s developer conference WWDC — Worldwide Developers Conference. Competitors’ equivalents — Google I/O, Microsoft Build — follow one after another during the spring, but have historically been rather sleepy affairs that have stood in the shadow of Apple.

Having watched a couple of dozen of them, it became clear that Apple’s position at the front of the field is not as well-deserved now as it once was. There is a lack of tension and presence in the presentations. And more than anything else — the innovation that once made the event indispensable for everyone in the tech world is missing.

At last year’s WWDC, AI services were announced that subsequently never had time to be completed before launch. Even today, some of them do not work — something that has led to lawsuits from disappointed customers. Apple did not repeat that mistake this time, barely promising anything in the field of AI, or Apple Intelligence as they call it.

They at least ripped the plaster off immediately and opened with AI. What is the tech world’s undeniably biggest and most important trend was given only a couple of minutes. Roughly equal time was spent showing how one could create dynamic wallpapers — images that move slightly depending on what is happening on the screen. A charming detail, certainly, but it was not for that reason that developers had planted themselves in front of their screens.

Apple is talented when they do what only they can do. The integrated experience between software and hardware — down to the chips — means they can create things their competitors struggle with. One piece of news was giving developers access to the language model that lives locally on Apple’s newer iPhones. By doing so, developers can avoid using cloud services, which easily becomes expensive at high usage. It is also possible to use the service at times when one’s phone has no internet access at all — which in reality is an extremely rare occurrence these days.

Given these conditions — a seamless experience between computers, watches and phones, in-house chips, and an enormous user base engaging with its products for many hours each day — many had hoped for far, far more. What could have been Apple’s own AI services became instead a new design system. New icons and animations that are now uniform across the many products. Again — attractive and pleasant — but neither exciting nor memorable.

Realistically, it will now take another year before anything major in AI can be released. Apple is traditional in this way, following a predefined cycle for its launches. New software is presented in June, new iPhones in early autumn. Then often a single release of computers at the start of the year. That the AI services were late and would not appear this year was admittedly expected, after insiders at the company had leaked information to American media. But the silence around them was probably what spoke loudest of all.

Apple’s top management team has looked almost identical for a very long time. Many of them were there in Steve Jobs’s day. CEO Tim Cook is a steady leader who has made Apple earn extraordinary amounts of money through a well-run portfolio. Some, like the seemingly always-polished Craig Federighi, have acquired cult status among developers. But it is difficult not to wonder whether some fresh blood at the top might have been needed.

Because Apple is in troubled waters — more than in many, many years. They have lost important legal cases involving the App Store, Trump’s trade tariffs are creating uncertainty in manufacturing, and the biggest tech trend — AI — is washing over Silicon Valley and the world like an avalanche.

In that situation, one had hoped to catch a glimpse of the old Apple — the one that could command the world’s undivided attention after a 90-minute presentation. Monday evening delivered many pieces of news — but nothing even close to that.

The clue to what Musk will do next

June 6, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 6th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Is it over between Elon Musk and Donald Trump for good? And what does the fight mean for Tesla? Here we answer four questions about the poisoned situation in the US.

Musk has just stepped down from the assignment of leading DOGE, an initiative aimed at finding savings and cuts within the machinery of government. Shortly afterwards, Donald Trump’s reform package the “Big Beautiful Bill” was passed by the House of Representatives and sent on to the Senate.

DOGE itself claims the organization has so far saved around 180 billion dollars for the American state — figures that have been strongly disputed by many. This, potentially hypothetical, saving was supposed to ease the American national debt. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” would, by contrast, increase the national debt by 2,400 billion dollars, according to independent calculations. Musk’s work with DOGE would thus be completely wiped out — and then some.

Musk called the reform proposal a “disgusting abomination” on X and demanded that it be changed.

According to Politico, the two were to speak on Friday to see if peace could be brokered. Trump himself appeared to torpedo that peace conversation before it had a chance to happen.

Both parties have a great deal to lose from the big fight. At the same time, it was entirely predictable that something like this would happen sooner or later. These are two men with enormous power and ego who at some point were almost inevitably going to end up on a collision course.

That it happened so fast — and escalated so much — was, however, more unexpected. Trump wrote that Musk had “gone crazy” because he removed tax subsidies on electric cars. Musk for his part wrote that the reason the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein has not been made public is that Trump is in it. And all of this happened publicly and openly, on social media.

On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump denied reports that he was to have a phone call with Elon Musk, according to ABC News.

For the situation to be resolved, both parties would need to make some kind of public climb-down. And that is precisely what argues against it happening.

Tesla lost just over 14 percent on the stock market on Thursday as a result of the fight. The company’s share price is, however, volatile, and its investors are used to sharp rises and falls from before. On Friday the share price rose again in New York.

In an ordinary listed company, Thursday’s events would have been a catastrophe. For Tesla, it has happened several times before.

The alliance between Trump and Musk had already been complicated for Tesla before all this. On the one hand, the close association with the world’s most powerful man had brought a great deal of visibility and potential political benefits. On the other hand, many former customers have turned against him and the Tesla brand has suffered.

At the top of Musk’s X profile sits a poll in which he asks his followers “whether it is time to create a new political party in the US that actually represents the 80 percent who are in the middle.” The answer “yes” is leading by a wide margin at the time of writing. The poll does not exactly feel like an obvious overture to a reconciliation between Musk and Trump.

Musk is well aware of the delicate situation he finds himself in, but does not have a history of taking a step back when things get complicated. He has previously transformed both the car industry and space travel. But having the American president as an enemy could turn out to be Musk’s greatest challenge yet.

Kristersson praises a lot — delivers little

June 5, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 5th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson says that Sweden has momentum on AI. Good — but it is not thanks to what is happening within his government.

Sweden is to produce a national AI strategy for the years 2025–2030. This could be read on the Ministry of Finance website, which recently published its digitalisation strategy. The AI strategy is not planned to be ready until “early 2026” — that is, more than a year into the five-year period it is meant to cover.

Neither the pace nor the execution inspires confidence. It is a bit like going orienteering and hoping to find a map once you are already out in the forest.

Background material for this delayed strategy is not lacking. The government itself appointed the former county governor Anna Kinberg Batra to investigate AI on their behalf. In addition, Carl-Henric Svanberg was asked to lead a new AI commission with a similar purpose.

Svanberg’s final report was pushed back in time — precisely because it was considered urgent. The report was handed over to the government, which then asked for it to be rewritten as a formal public inquiry. It therefore now sits in consultation with the same kinds of bodies that were already consulted in the earlier report.

Let us also not forget that AI Sweden, a Swedish “partner network” part-funded by Vinnova, shared its AI strategy for Sweden last year. And that as far back as 2018, a “national direction for artificial intelligence” was published by the Ministry of Finance. In it one could read that “if the opportunities of AI are to be realised, Sweden needs to develop its long-term knowledge and skills supply in the AI field.” Where that has gone in the past seven years is unclear.

Despite an abundance of investigations and documents, very little is happening on AI from the government. Mathias Sundin, one of the participants in the AI commission, said the following to Dagens Media:

“The opportunities that exist now will be seized in some other part of the world. In the 1990s we were number one in the world with the internet, and from that came companies like Mojang, Spotify, Klarna and Skype. That kind of thing happens early in a transition.”

It is hard to disagree. While Sweden sends remits and investigations back and forth, the rest of the world is running past us. That might perhaps have been acceptable — Sweden is a small country that cannot be the best at everything. But when Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson praises several private AI initiatives and also speaks of momentum on the AI question, it is still reasonable to ask what this momentum and interest has actually produced from the government’s side.

That list of examples is unfortunately short. But one need not look further than across the North Sea to see how it could work.

As early as 2021, the United Kingdom invested 10.5 billion kronor to establish ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), an agency for advanced research. ARIA drew inspiration from the American DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a predecessor that contributed to developing technologies including GPS and mRNA. Through its own projects and by funding others, ARIA and DARPA can ensure that important development happens in their respective home countries.

ARIA is not a dedicated AI unit, but its mandate suits the field perfectly. Find and develop advanced technology that benefits everyone — and that in the short term benefits the United Kingdom most of all.

Looking further afield, Saudi Arabia just invested 96 billion kronor in building Humain — a state-owned AI company with the aim of establishing the country as a leader in the field. Saudi Arabia is a large and wealthy country, one might say. Perhaps not a fair comparison for Sweden? So let us look at something at the other end of the scale as well: Singapore. Over the coming five years, even that small Southeast Asian country will invest around ten billion kronor in AI.

And so we come to Sweden. In the spring budget one could see in black and white how the AI question has been prioritised. It amounted to 30 million kronor for the Swedish Tax Agency and 30 million kronor for the Social Insurance Agency. Beyond that, we got a “regulatory sandbox” to avoid immediately having to shut down development in areas where legislation is not sufficiently clear.

Yes, you hear it. The momentum that Ulf Kristersson speaks of is conspicuously absent in Sweden. At least from official quarters. While the countries around us are investing billions, we are spending millions investigating the investigations that have already been done. And if we are lucky, we will get a strategy for the country more than a year after it was supposed to come into force. We can do better.

Up 2,800 percent — is the strategy sustainable?

May 30, 2025
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 30th, 2025. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Donald Trump’s listed company, the games retailer GameStop, and Japanese love hotels. All three have adopted their new strategy from stock market favourite MicroStrategy: borrow money and buy bitcoin. Enthusiasts see a rocket ship — critics warn of a crash.

They are called love hotels. Simple Japanese hotels that can be rented by the hour for a private meeting. They are popular in a culture where many people live at home until they marry.

The company Metaplanet had these as its business idea for many years. Somewhat forgotten on the stock market, the company’s share price barely moved for several years. In 2024, the management decided to change strategy. Now they would buy bitcoin instead. In one year, the share price has surged by over 1,900 percent.

Metaplanet is not alone. When their ordinary business falters, more and more companies are now turning to bitcoin as an alternative. And it all started with a man whose personal fortune fell by around 60 billion kronor after he was accused of accounting fraud.

The central figure behind the phenomenon is named Michael Saylor. He is the founder of the company MicroStrategy Incorporated, which recently renamed itself the more abstract “Strategy.” But it is the name MicroStrategy that has become known among both thousands of retail investors and large hedge funds and institutions.

MicroStrategy was originally a business intelligence company that sold software. The company was listed on the stock exchange in 1998, and just a year later Saylor was named the wealthiest man in Washington DC.

That wealth was short-lived. In March 2000, MicroStrategy announced that the financial results of the previous two years were inaccurate and needed to be restated. The share price dropped like a stone — a full 62 percent in a single day. Saylor had to pay a fine but escaped having to admit that he had done anything criminal.

Fast forward 20 years and Saylor delivers a quarterly report for MicroStrategy, July 2020. The share price that once stood as high as 333 dollars now sits at around 11 dollars. Saylor announces that the company will buy bitcoin using part of its cash holdings, and a month later the company has purchased 21,454 of them.

Neither Saylor nor anyone else could have anticipated that this purchase would lay the foundation for the company’s entire business — and start a trend that would sweep up billion-dollar companies in its wake.

The MicroStrategy model is both remarkably simple and yet difficult to understand. The company sells shares or issues bonds of various kinds to the market. With the money it receives it buys bitcoin. Had the assets it was buying been stable, they would have balanced each other out. But that is not the case with bitcoin, as is well known.

Instead, something very strange has emerged. When MicroStrategy issues a loan for 100 kronor, and then buys bitcoin for 100 kronor, its share price rises by 150 kronor. The numbers are not exact in any way, but they serve as an illustration of the phenomenon. The increased market capitalization means it can issue more loans, buy more bitcoin — and then see the market cap rise again. It sounds strange, doesn’t it? But in five years, MicroStrategy’s share price has risen by over 2,800 percent. The perpetual motion machine keeps spinning.

It surprises no one that the rise in the share price has attracted attention. The list of companies that now intend to copy MicroStrategy is long. Japan’s Metaplanet now has only one hotel left in its portfolio, The Royal Oak Gotanda in Tokyo. It is being converted and will soon be renamed “The Bitcoin Hotel.”

This week, the games retailer GameStop and Donald Trump’s media company TMTG both announced that they will do the same and invest in bitcoin as an asset in their respective companies. For them, however, the share price fell by around ten percent immediately after the news. Is the strategy already beginning to cool?

There is reason to suspect so, at least. The sceptical reader has probably already sensed a hole in the reasoning above. What happens to MicroStrategy and the other companies if the bitcoin price suddenly crashes? Or simply stops rising? Then the company is left with an enormous amount of outstanding debt even though the assets in the business have collapsed. Creditors can then receive shares in the company, but who wants them if the value has crashed?

The short answer is that nobody really knows. A reasonable guess is that it would end badly. The slightly longer answer is that the risk is something one must accept in order to have the chance of the opposite scenario — that the price of bitcoin shoots skyward. Were that to happen, MicroStrategy, as one of the world’s largest holders of bitcoin, would have no problem settling its debts with a comfortable margin. But that this is not a share — or a risk profile — like any other is clear.

With these risks in mind, one might wonder who is actually trading in them. And here another picture of what is happening emerges. The innovation that MicroStrategy has created is, at its core, financial.

The company has constructed a long range of financial products that it sells to various funds and institutions. Since it still has a software product as well — the same idea as 20 years ago — funds that are not permitted to trade in cryptocurrencies can still buy MicroStrategy. There are ETFs (exchange-traded funds) created solely to trade the shares with leverage, meaning with even higher risk. The volatility — which for a retail investor might seem off-putting — becomes, on the contrary, attractive for certain funds with strategies that benefit from it.

The scale is enormous. On certain days this spring, exchange-traded funds built on MicroStrategy have been the most heavily traded securities on the American stock market. And everything rests on the simple thesis that if they raise more money, they can buy more bitcoin. The financial innovation is having created so many types of fund products that they can draw in money from every conceivable institution.

As the money flows into MicroStrategy, the bitcoin price has continued to rise. There is only a certain number in circulation, and there can never be more. That is part of the reasoning behind why the value will continue to go up. And if you believe that the price of bitcoin will only ever rise, you can also accept that MicroStrategy is valued at so much more than its underlying assets. The price is only going up, right?

But everything does not always continue upward on the stock exchange. The more companies that try to copy what MicroStrategy is doing, the more large buyers of bitcoin there are. But if they fail to replicate the same perpetual motion machine with fresh capital, that enthusiasm can quickly reverse.

Should the bitcoin price — for whatever reason — fall sharply, the situation on the ordinary stock market could also become very shaky. Cryptocurrencies have found the back door into the equity market, one could say. And with them, risks at a level that ordinary savers are unaccustomed to.