Focus on the economy in the Tech Panel seminar

Members Industrial policy

On 14 December, TechSverige organized a seminar on the tech industry and economic development. This was an exclusive meeting for members and was held within the framework of the newly launched Tech Panel. 

After the chairman and director of TechSverige, Per Wallentin, CEO of Knowit, and Åsa Zetterberg, respectively, welcomed the audience, Almega's chief economist Patrick Joyce and Christina Ramm-Ericson, head of industrial policy at TechSverige, presented an assessment of the economic situation.

- We can say that we are currently on the brink of a recession. You can't really see it in the outcome figures because we still have positive output figures even for the third quarter of the year but pessimism is quite widespread in the corporate sector, but especially in households," said Patrick Joyce and continued:

- Almost 50% of households believe that their finances will get significantly worse in the near future. This is partly odd because unemployment is low. Even during the financial crisis, they did not expect such bad times as they do now. What worries households, of course, is inflation.

The budget bill forecasts weaker GDP growth, which is expected to be -0.4% in 2023. At the same time, unemployment is expected to rise to 7.7%.

In collaboration with the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise's entrepreneurial panel, TechSverige has started the Tech Panel and asked questions to just over 300 member companies during November. The questions have been about how they see sales, investments and number of employees in the future. While the outlook for the entire business sector is darker than it has been for 14 years, the Tech Panel shows that a majority of companies in the tech industry believe in increased sales volumes and greater staff needs.

- However, we have seen over the past year that confidence can change rapidly. We should remember that we are at the beginning of a recession and it could get even worse. Many businesses are suffering from high energy prices and there is a lot of uncertainty about how the war in Ukraine will unfold and whether the increase in key interest rates will push down inflation. We simply don't know how deep and severe the recession will be," says Christina Ramm-Ericson.

The seminar ended with a reflective panel consisting of Sofia Gerstenfeld, CEO of Visma Enterprise AB, Vahid Zohali, CEO of IBM Svenska AB and Jenny Lindqvist, Head of Northern and Central Europe at Ericsson AB. It emerged that there is still much to do for companies linked to digitization and automation of various processes. "The beauty of the tech industry is that it has a lot to offer both when the economy is doing well and when it is not. In this situation, it is important to continue investing and not slow down. In conclusion, tougher times are ahead, but there are opportunities to create a more sustainable society in a recession.