Swedish Arms Industry: From Falun Copper to Gripen

Iron, copper and silver paid for Sweden’s wars. Today the weapons themselves are the export. Who grew rich along the way?

Iron before the cannons

Sweden did not start with weapons. It started with rock.

Long before Sweden sold a single cannon, it sold metal. In the Middle Ages, iron was Sweden’s most important export. People also began to mine copper, for example in Falun. From the 13th century, mining communities organized themselves in groups called bergslag. The region in central Sweden where this began still carries the name Bergslagen.

One site shows how early this was. Lapphyttan in Norberg is a type site for the medieval blast furnace. It probably dates from between 1150 and 1350. The furnace made cast iron that workers then refined into lumps for trade. These lumps are probably the iron pieces called osmunds. Osmunds appear in English customs records in the 1250s.

The people who made this iron were not full-time industrial workers. They were farmers who lived near their fields and shared a furnace and a mine with their neighbors. After the harvest they made charcoal, and in winter and early spring they worked at the furnace.

Was Sweden a giant in medieval iron? No. Jernkontoret estimates the total annual production at this time at about 2,000 tonnes, less than a third of what the German forges made. The price of Swedish osmund iron began to fall around the mid-14th century and kept falling in the 15th century.

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The Hanseatic grip

Who carried this iron to Europe? Mostly German merchants.

The Hanseatic League, through the free city of Lübeck, had a near monopoly on trade with Sweden and Bergslagen (Wikipedia says). One study of medieval mining says that already in 1368, osmund iron made up one third of the exports from Stockholm to Lübeck.

The German presence went beyond trade. Many German merchants and craftsmen moved to Stockholm in the Middle Ages, and by the mid-1300s the city had a partly Hanseatic character. One source says Swedish law gave German town dwellers separate seats on town councils until 1471.

The Hansa also controlled routes. In the 16th century, Swedish osmund iron went to Danzig and was sold on as “bar iron from Danzig”, mainly to Holland and England. The buyer in London did not always know that the iron came from Bergslagen.

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Copper Mountain and the silver mine

Two mines changed the story: Stora Kopparberget in Falun and Sala silvergruva.

Falun’s copper mine appears for the first time in a document from 1288. A purchase deed from that year records the sale of a share in the mine, and King Magnus gave the mining community a charter in 1347. This is why Stora Kopparberg is often called one of the oldest companies in the world.

For a long time, the mine was a quiet business. One encyclopedia says it mainly supplied Lübeck until the mid-1500s. Then demand grew. Bronze cannons, Dutch copper goods and Spanish copper coins all needed Swedish copper.

Silver came from Sala. Silver was probably found there at the end of the 1400s, and in 1512 Sten Sture the Younger gave the mine its first charter. Newer dating methods suggest that people mined there already in the 1100s. The mine’s best decades were the 1530s and 1540s. At its peak, it produced up to 4,000 kilograms of silver a year. At least 2,000 people lived in the mining village, at a time when Stockholm had about 8,000 inhabitants.

I have walked through both mines on guided tours. Underground, the scale of the work is hard to forget.

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Gustav Vasa breaks free

Metal and money also decided who ruled Sweden.

Gustav Vasa became king after a costly revolt that Lübeck helped to pay for. Lübeck and the Hansa were the dominant power in the North, with economic control over Sweden. After the war, Sweden still owed Lübeck a large debt.

The silver helped him. The Sala mine belonged to the crown, and Gustav Vasa worked personally to improve it. He also took about 6,500 kilograms of silver from the Church.

He then started to build a state arms industry. In 1551, Gustav Vasa ordered a weapons workshop on Jäders holme near Arboga. The aim was to give the Swedish army a uniform arsenal, on a European model. Water from the Arboga river drove the hammers, and the pig iron came from nearby works in Bergslagen.

Cannons came soon after. Sweden has cast cannons since the second half of the 1500s, and the gun foundries in Sörmland received crown privileges in the late 1500s and early 1600s. Firearms also changed power at home. Only governments could afford many cannons, and aristocrats’ castles could not resist them.

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“Sweden’s Indies”: copper pays for an empire

In 1611, the 17-year-old Gustav II Adolf became king. Sweden was at war with Denmark and Russia. Twenty years later, it was a leading military power in Europe. How?

The main answer is copper. Stora Kopparberg was the largest copper mine in Europe, and the king used its income to pay for his political and military goals. Copper helped Sweden pay the Danish ransom for Älvsborg after 1612, and it paid for Gustav II Adolf’s wars to such a degree that people called the mine “Sweden’s Indies”.

How large was Falun on a European and world scale? Falun municipality says about 70 percent of all copper in Europe came from Falun in the 1600s. A UNESCO World Heritage document goes further and says Falun made 70 percent of the world’s output by the mid-1600s. A French encyclopedia says Falun made almost all of Europe’s copper and about half of the world’s in 1650. The sources disagree on the world share, but they all agree that Falun dominated Europe. The peak came in 1650, with about 3,000 tonnes of copper.

The town grew with the mine. With some 6,000 people, Falun was Sweden’s second largest town in the 1600s. At times, more than 1,000 men worked in the mine.

The good years ended badly. The mine collapsed in June 1687, 37 years after the peak.

Copper also shaped Swedish money. Copper was Sweden’s most important export until the mid-1600s. Because Sweden had little silver, the copper coins had to be very large to match the value of silver. The largest, from 1644, weighed 19.7 kilograms.

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Cannons for Europe: Finspång and the Walloons

Sweden had the metal. It lacked the skills. These came from the Low Countries.

Willem de Besche came to Sweden from Antwerp in 1595, and in 1616 he took over the works at Finspång in Östergötland. Together with the banker Louis De Geer, he organized a large Swedish export of copper, iron, brass and cannons to Europe. They brought smiths and craftsmen from Wallonia.

Finspång specialized in cast-iron cannons. The De Geer family took over the works from the crown in 1641, and for the rest of the 17th century and all of the 18th century, the works had a monopoly on cannon production in Sweden. The last gun was test-fired there in 1912.

Swedish guns traveled far. A cannon found on the wreck of Queen Anne’s Revenge, the pirate ship of Blackbeard, is probably Swedish. A researcher who studied it says the De Geer works specialized in guns for export.

Is it true that Sweden was the world’s largest exporter of cast-iron cannons? Many popular texts say so. I did not find this claim in the sources I read. That does not prove it is wrong.

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Who grew rich?

The wealth did not spread evenly.

The Hansa. For centuries, Lübeck merchants bought Swedish metal and sold it on at a profit. An older Swedish account from the early 1900s describes the trade treaties as very profitable for Lübeck and says Swedish trade was under Hanseatic control for almost 300 years. That is one national view; German historians may tell it differently.

The crown. Sala silver and Falun copper went straight into the king’s hands. Gustav Vasa ran Sala as a crown mine, and Gustav II Adolf used Falun to finance his wars.

The miners who owned shares. In Falun, the bergsmän were part-owners of the mine, and they combined farming with copper production. Their farms still stand around Falun and are part of the World Heritage site. One 18th-century report describes a rich and powerful miner who traveled to Stockholm to discuss mining laws with the king.

The foreign entrepreneurs. The De Geer family turned Finspång into a center of Swedish industry. Their castle at Finspång, begun in 1668, is one of Sweden’s largest 17th-century castles.

Women in the supply chain. Women are rarely named in this history, but they are there. One of the largest timber suppliers for the navy yard that built the warship Vasa was Brita Posse, the woman who ran the estate of Ängsö near Västerås.

And the others? Most miners were not rich. The work was dangerous, and the smoke from Falun killed plants for miles around. I found no reliable figure for how many miners died in these centuries.

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Bar iron for Britain

In the 1600s, Sweden changed its iron. The decisive modernization came at the beginning of that century, when the kings moved from osmunds to bar iron.

Bar iron then became Sweden’s great export. In the 1700s, Sweden’s iron production almost doubled, mainly because England needed high-quality “Oregrund” iron for its steel industry. Bar iron made up as much as 75 percent of Sweden’s total export value, and 80 to 90 percent of all bar iron was sold abroad. One researcher argues that British steel production came to depend fully on Swedish iron.

Then England learned to use coal instead of charcoal, and Swedish iron lost its lead. In the 1800s, the United States became the largest buyer of Swedish bar iron, until the First World War.

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Bofors, Nobel and the age of steel

Bofors is often linked to the 1600s. That is only half true.

The site in Karlskoga began in 1646 as a hammer mill, owned by the crown. In 1873 it became a company, AB Bofors-Gullspång. In the 1870s it sold steel to the Finspång gun works, and in 1884 it opened its first cannon workshop.

Then came Alfred Nobel. He bought Bofors in 1894 and owned it until his death in December 1896. He helped turn an iron and steel producer into a modern cannon maker with a chemical branch. By 1911, Bofors had bought and closed its old rival, Finspång.

The best-known Bofors product came between the world wars. The Bofors 40 mm gun was the world’s first fully automatic anti-aircraft gun. During the Second World War, both sides used it.

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The industry of neutrality

After 1945, Sweden chose a policy of non-alignment in peace, aimed at neutrality in war. Neutrality had a price. To be credible, Sweden wanted to build its own weapons, so that no great power could stop its supply.

Saab, founded in 1937, became the center of this effort with jet aircraft such as Tunnan, Lansen, Draken and Viggen. In the mid-1950s, the Swedish air force had about 1,000 combat aircraft, most of them designed and built in Sweden. Many sources say it was the fourth largest air force in the world, but they disagree on the decade.

Export was part of the plan. The home market was too small to pay for the development of jets, submarines and guided weapons. Selling abroad kept the cost per unit down.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Swedish arms exports were about 3 billion kronor a year.

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Who makes what today, and where

Today’s industry makes software and sensors as much as steel. It is also tied to a few Swedish towns.

Saab builds the JAS 39 Gripen fighter in Linköping, a town that grew up around the company. It makes radar and surveillance systems, with a large and growing base in Gothenburg. It makes missiles and the Carl-Gustaf recoilless rifle in Karlskoga, and its Kockums unit builds submarines in Karlskrona.

BAE Systems Bofors in Karlskoga makes the Archer artillery system and ammunition. BAE Systems Hägglunds in Örnsköldsvik makes the CV90 combat vehicle. The old Bofors company split up after 2000: Saab kept missiles and light weapons, and the heavy weapons division passed through a US owner to British BAE Systems in 2005.

How many people work in the industry? It depends on how you count. According to the government, the 25 largest defense companies have just over 22,000 employees and account for over 90 percent of Swedish arms sales. The industry association SOFF counts more widely and includes security and cyber companies. Its member companies had about 33,650 full-time employees in 2025, up from 28,416 in 2024 and about 22,250 in 2023.

The money grew just as fast. SOFF’s members had a combined turnover of 99.7 billion kronor in 2024 and about 123.9 billion in 2025. They spent about 15.3 billion kronor on research and product development in 2025.

About half of this is exported. In 2025, SOFF’s members exported for about 65.1 billion kronor, or 52.6 percent of their turnover. In 2024, the export share fell below half, and for the first time in more than twenty years, the Swedish home market was larger than the export market.

The state is also spending more. Since 2022, Sweden’s defense budget has doubled, to 148 billion kronor in 2025.

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How big is the arms industry in the economy?

This is the question I wanted to answer most. The short answer: important for some towns, small for the whole economy.

First, a warning about numbers. SOFF’s export figure (65.1 billion kronor) is more than twice the official figure for war materiel (28 billion). SOFF counts all products and services from its members, including civil security and cyber products. The Inspectorate of Strategic Products, ISP, counts only war materiel. I use ISP’s figure below.

In 2025, Swedish exports of war materiel were just over 28 billion kronor, slightly below the record of 29 billion in 2024. Sixty-one countries received deliveries from Sweden. Over 80 percent of the exports went to the 39 countries that the government calls established partners. These were the ten largest buyers:

Source: ISP, Swedish exports of war materiel 2025.

Then I compared the 2025 export value with official Swedish statistics:

Note: Statistics Sweden reports research spending of 233.7 billion kronor in 2025, equal to 3.51 percent of GDP. I used this to estimate GDP.

On a world scale, Sweden is a mid-sized supplier. SIPRI ranks Sweden as the 15th largest exporter of major arms in 2021–25, with 0.9 percent of the world total. This was a 58 percent increase from 2016–20. The main buyers were Brazil, Ukraine and Pakistan. SIPRI measures the volume of major weapons, not money.

What about imports? No Swedish authority publishes the value of arms imports in kronor. Sweden is not among SIPRI’s 40 largest importers. One data site using SIPRI figures shows Swedish arms exports of 381 and imports of 66 (SIPRI trend-indicator values) in 2024. On that measure, Sweden exports almost six times more major arms than it imports.

So war materiel is less than one percent of Swedish exports. Yet for towns like Karlskoga, Linköping, Karlskrona and Örnsköldsvik, the industry is a large part of local jobs.

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Then and now: the 1600s and today

How does Sweden’s great-power era compare with today? This table puts the two side by side, with the facts I could confirm.

Two things stand out. In the 1600s, Sweden sold the metal and let others make most of the weapons. Today, Sweden makes the weapons and imports many of the metals they need.

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The new ore: rare earths and critical minerals

Old Sweden needed iron and copper for its weapons. Modern weapons still need special steel, aluminum and copper. But they also need metals that few countries produce: rare earth elements for magnets in motors, radar and guidance systems, gallium for radar, and germanium for night-vision equipment.

This supply is now a security question, because production sits in very few countries. In 2022, China made about 98 percent of the world’s gallium and about 68 percent of the world’s refined germanium. In August 2023, China put export controls on both metals. China also dominates the value chain for rare earth elements, and Europe has no mining of them at all.

Here, Sweden has a new chance. In January 2023, LKAB reported more than one million tonnes of rare earth oxides in the Per Geijer deposit in Kiruna, and called it the largest known deposit of its kind in Europe. LKAB has since raised the figure to 2.2 million tonnes in situ, and now calls it one of Europe’s largest deposits.

The history repeats itself. Once more, a strategic metal lies in Swedish rock. Once more, the question is who will process it, and who will profit.

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The controversies

Swedish arms exports have never been without conflict. The law itself says that exports of war materiel are forbidden, unless the government or ISP grants an exception for defense or security reasons.

The Bofors affair in India

On 24 March 1986, India signed a contract with Bofors for 410 FH-77B howitzers. On 16 April 1987, Swedish Radio reported that Bofors had paid bribes to Indian politicians and defense officials to win the deal. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi denied in parliament that any middlemen or bribes were involved. His Congress party lost the election in November 1989. In 2004, the Delhi High Court quashed the bribery charges against Rajiv Gandhi and others.

The case also damaged Olof Palme’s reputation as a man of peace, as he and his ministers had lobbied India for the contract. In a later twist, the Indian army used the Bofors guns in the Kargil war of 1999.

The Bofors smuggling case

In the same decade, several Bofors directors received suspended sentences for smuggling weapons, and the parent company Nobel Industries was fined 11 million kronor for illegal arms exports.

Exports to non-democracies

The Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) argues that 32 percent of Swedish arms exports in 2021–2025 went to non-democracies, meaning countries with large democratic flaws. The party wants a ban on exports to dictatorships and countries at war.

In the parliamentary debate in June 2026, the Moderate Party answered that 80 percent of exports go to 39 long-standing partner countries and that Sweden trades almost only with democracies. The same speaker admitted that some buyers, such as Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, are not democracies, but said exports must also serve Swedish foreign policy interests.

Follow-on deliveries

Old contracts keep running. In 2024, Sweden delivered two GlobalEye radar aircraft to the United Arab Emirates, worth over 6 billion kronor, under a license granted in 2016. Sweden has not granted licenses to sell war materiel to the Israeli state since the 1950s, but some follow-on deliveries of components went to private companies in Israel in 2024.

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Nato and the new rules

Sweden’s Nato membership has changed the rules. In April 2026, the government proposed a new framework for war materiel. It adapts the export guidelines to Nato membership, makes penalties for serious crimes against the law harsher, and adds secrecy for some export control information. The law changes were proposed to take effect on 1 August 2026, and parliament approved the proposal.

Critics want more control, not less. The Green Party (Miljöpartiet) wants an inquiry into control of arms imports, which today is mostly a practical procurement question for FMV, based on performance and price. The Left Party points to a parliamentary study showing that nine of eleven similar countries regulate arms imports.

Eight hundred years ago, farmers in Bergslagen made iron in winter, and German merchants carried it away. Today, Swedish engineers make fighter jets, and governments far away decide how to use them.

The metal has changed. The question has not. Who decides where Swedish weapons go — and who carries the responsibility when they arrive?

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Sources

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