Baillie Gifford after employees . It ’ s not the usual Anglo-Saxon mentality of mainly looking after the shareholder .” The last time Paice visited Atlas Copco , it was to meet managers at Investor , the Wallenberg ’ s holding company . Portraits of all five generations of the family hung on the wall . “ You get that sense of history and the legacy ,” he says . “ The family is there to protect and maintain these businesses . It wants to pass them onto the next generation in a better shape than they inherited them .” This mentality lends itself to longer-term and more valuable decision-making . When asked , Jacob Wallenberg , the former vicechairman , says , “ long-term investing is 50 years and beyond ”. Other Swedish companies that benefit from family ownership include Hexagon , Sandvik , Volvo , Handelsbanken and Assa Abloy , Paice notes . “ Each of these companies has a family member on the board . This means they have a long-term owner who influences capital allocation decisions .”
Clusters of innovation But Paice has noticed a change : “ We ’ re starting to see this generational shift . Multigenerational families are being joined by firstgeneration founder-run businesses , such as Spotify .” These companies feed off Sweden ’ s culture of innovation that ’ s supportive of start-ups . “ Role models such as Daniel Ek , founder of Spotify , have given startups a role model and the ambition to see what they could achieve .” Public policy helps . In the 1990s , the government offered Swedish residents a tax break to buy personal computers with the aim to put a PC in every home . “ This helped the Swedes become early adopters of technology . Then a few years later , Stockholm built the largest open fibre network . And 100 per cent of businesses and most homes tapped into that . That has been a massive benefit for these companies .” Stockholm in particular has become known as a ‘ unicorn factory ’ – a unicorn being a privately held startup
Issue 87 - September 2022 / 21 /