text: Sweden: the Tech Unicorn Factory - Guide to Working in Sweden | Darwin Recruitment
  Sweden: the Tech Unicorn Factory - Guide to Working in Sweden
  Darwin Country Guide Sweden is a hotbed for tech startups and home to both home-grown and international billion-dollar technology giants.
  Internationally successful startups including Candy Crush, Minecraft and Spotify hail from the nation's capital, Stockholm, and household names such as Skype, Spotify and µTorrent were created by Swedes. The country also houses tech's biggest players, including Electrolux, Ericsson, Google and Microsoft.
  Stockholm has seen phenomenal tech success, producing more "unicorns" (a start-up company valued at more than $1 billion) than any other city. Despite having a population of just 800,000, the city also took 15% of all foreign investment in the European tech sector in 2014. There are also more than 20,000 tech businesses and almost one-fifth of the city's workforce is employed in technology roles.
  Technically speaking, Sweden has it all. With super-fast internet speeds, its overall broadband take-up rivals the early adopter cities in Asia, and more than 90% the country's population use the internet on a weekly basis. Sweden liberalised its telecommunications industry in the 1980s and 1990s, well ahead of most of its European neighbours and the US, allowing for an open and competitive telecom market. Big players include TeliaSonera, Tele2, Eltel and Telenor Sverige.
  Sweden's Arctic temperatures have also made it a popular location for data centres, with firms such as Facebook and Bitcoin company KnCMiner both opening facilities to take advantage of the freezing temperatures. The country also announced tax cuts for data centre providers, so we expect to see more such facilities in the future.
  Sweden has had a turbulent past with the cloud, after hundreds of Swedish companies lost out on large international contracts after their secrets were leaked to competitors due to security breaches as a result of the explosion in cloud computing in 2011. This has not hampered cloud development though, with Microsoft using a Swedish company to "battle test" the cloud and Telstra announcing plans to open a Cloud Innovation Centre with Ericcson and AWS to research and launch hybrid cloud centres worldwide.
  If you would like to find out more about working in the exciting environment of the world's "tech unicorn factory", please contact one of the Darwin Recruitment team today.
  The Swedish team here at Darwin
  Sweden at Darwin consists of the Perm Software team, offering their services across the areas of Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmo.
  Sweden shares its borders with Norway, Finland and Denmark.
  All Nordic citizens are eligible to work in Sweden.
  EU residents are required to hold a residence card to be able to work within the country.
  It can be difficult in some cases to find accommodation. The rental market can sometimes be unreliable.
  Between 40,000 – 50,000SEK
  The cost of living in Sweden is approximately 11% lower on average than the UK. It does, however, have the highest tax rate in Europe.