“Amazon came to us through Stockholm Business Alliance,” says Eva Lilja, Business Director for Västerås, referring a recent decision by cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a data centre in the municipality.
“We’d never have reached Amazon otherwise,” she adds.
Set up in 2006, Stockholm Business Alliance (SBA) is a voluntary partnership between 55 municipalities in eight counties in and around the Swedish capital. It provides members with a range of support services in order to present a stronger business offering to international investors.
And it’s working.
In the dozen years since SBA’s founding, it has helped more and more companies to establish each year, with over 90 businesses set up in 2017 alone.