On a coffee note, the Swedish coffee business has been the strongest of all segments of the Swedish restaurant industry. Now to cars.
Koenigsegg is a Swedish car manufacturer, producing insanely fast cars that are really really cleverly engineered. Even though Koenigsegg is a pretty small company their ambitions are very cool. This show as their persistent job to get better and better makes for one of our worlds most thought after automobiles.
SAAB was a pretty cool car manufacturer trying to produce good cars to sell in big volumes. They have contributed greatly to the car community by clever solutions and innovative ideas. Sadly they were never very good at the business side of thing so the economy has pretty much always been shit.. From what I heard there were more people working in the office (engineers, marketers, designers, etc.) than there were people building cars.
SAAB was owned by GM until 2009 I think. Back then their economy was more rubbish than before and had to be sold off or they would be bankrupt. Koenigsegg was one of the few who wanted to buy the company. According to Christian Von Koenigsegg the owner and founder of Koenigsegg SAAB needed innovation and entrepreneurial support to survive. He said that with SAABS fantastic and underutilized innovation centre and Koenigseggs way of working and doing business SAAB could be brought back into shape relatively fast. They could also add a fair deal of Koenigsegg technology into the new SAAB cars.
Sadly Koenigsegg never got a chance to turn things around. Pity. I think that would have worked out fine. A really sloppy job by GM, the Swedish government and all different layers involved resulted in a bankruptcy. Another sportscar manufacturer called Spyker then bought the factory and what ever they could get off the intellectual property. Sadly, it was far from enough. The Dutch Spyker didn’t stand a chance of getting the company going again. Today there is a third owner involved after yet another bankruptcy. They aren’t doing well either..
So. I liked the idea of Koenigsegg taking over SAAB as they knew what they were doing. They put in a good offer in time, they wanted the substantial amounts of intellectual property of GM needed to keep building the cars and they know the Swedish way of doing things. But no go. Now they only build their Koenigseggs and the are pretty damn epic! Look at this:
