Swedish agency for growth policy analysis (Growth analysis) has in accordance with the Act on Official Statistics (SFS 2001:99) and the Appendix to the Ordinance on Statistics (SFS 2001:100) the task of producing and making statistics on international enterprises available. As a part of this work Growth analysis produces an annual report on the affiliates of Swedish controlled groups abroad. This report only presents data concerning groups which have at least one employee in an affiliate abroad, and the data applies to business operations in 2009.

In 2009 there were 1,476 Swedish controlled groups with affiliates abroad, an increase of 37 groups since 2008. The number of employees in these amounted to slightly more than 1.56 million, a decrease of 4 per cent over the preceding year. The number of employees abroad decreased by 31,000 to slightly more than 1.1 million, whilst the number in Sweden decreased by slightly more than 31,000 persons to 449,000 employees.

Of the 1,476 Swedish groups with affiliates abroad in 2009, 477 groups (32 per cent) had affiliates in Norway. Between 19 and 25 per cent of the groups had affiliates in the other Scandinavian countries, the UK, Germany and the USA.

This report only covers Swedish controlled groups with at least one affiliate and one employee abroad. The data is based on the annual reports of the groups, and is available from the Swedish Companies Registration Office (Bolagsverket). A group is defined as Swedish controlled, if 50 per cent of the group head, at the top of the group structure, is controlled by Swedish institutional controlling units.