AICEP, Portugal’s trade and investment agency, announced this week a business mission to Sweden on 17 and 18 November 2026 for Portuguese aerospace and defence companies. The programme pairs a bilateral seminar and B2B meetings organised with SOFF, the Swedish Security and Defence Industry Association, with visits to Saab and SSC – Swedish Space Corporation, where each Portuguese company gets a five-minute pitch. AICEP says the aim is to open opportunities for internationalisation, cooperation and integration into supply chains. Expressions of interest close on 16 October; places are limited to one representative per company and allocated in order of confirmation, and participants pay their own travel and accommodation.

The two-day programme

The first day, according to the programme on AICEP’s agenda page, opens at 10:30 with remarks by SOFF’s secretary-general, Robert Limmergård, and Portugal’s ambassador to Sweden, Francisco Alegre Duarte, followed by a presentation from AICEP’s director in Sweden, Miguel Fontoura, and one from SOFF. Three further presentations are marked “to be confirmed”: AED Cluster Portugal, FMV – the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration – and idD Portugal Defence. After lunch the Portuguese companies introduce themselves at 13:40, and B2B meetings run from 14:35 to 16:45. The day closes with a reception hosted by the ambassador at his official residence.

On 18 November the delegation goes to Saab’s premises at Olof Palmes gata 17 in Stockholm for a visit from 09:00 to 11:00: a presentation by Saab, then a five-minute pitch from each Portuguese company. A bus then takes the group to SSC at Torggatan 15 in Solna, where the same format runs from 11:45 to 13:30. The programme ends at 14:00. AICEP asks participants to arrive on 16 November and to leave on the 18th or 19th.

Who is on the Swedish side

SOFF is AICEP’s institutional partner for the B2B meetings. The association says on its Swedish website that it has about 500 member companies, close to 250 of them small and medium-sized enterprises, working in civil security, cyber and defence; its English site says the network employs close to 34,500 people and turns over about €11.3 billion a year, 60 percent of it from exports. SOFF is a member of ASD, Europe’s aerospace and defence industries association, and of the NATO Industrial Advisory Group. AICEP says a representative of FMV, the government agency that procures, develops and manages equipment for the Swedish Armed Forces, will attend the seminar, although the programme still lists FMV’s presentation as unconfirmed.

AICEP describes SSC, the mission’s second host, as a Swedish state-owned company that operates the Esrange launch base in northern Sweden and provides satellite tracking, satellite operations and space-infrastructure services worldwide. Founded in 1972 and headquartered in Solna, it runs its own satellite ground stations in Sweden, the United States, Canada, Chile, Thailand and Australia. In January 2023 it inaugurated an orbital launch complex at Esrange, presented at the time as the first facility on the EU mainland able to launch satellites into orbit.

The Saab thread

For Saab, the visit falls in the middle of its campaign to sell the Gripen E to Portugal as the replacement for the Air Force’s F-16s. In a statement to ECO/eRadar on 25 September, reported by NorthSouth HQ, the company said it would submit a proposal once Lisbon launches the official process, rather than send an unsolicited offer as Dassault Aviation has done and the Eurofighter consortium has said it will. Saab also pointed to memoranda of understanding with AED Cluster Portugal, Critical Software and OGMA, and said several other Portuguese companies are part of its global supply chain. In April, Daniel Boestad, head of Saab’s Gripen business unit, told Portuguese reporters that four Portuguese companies were already supplying the Gripen programme: Critical Software, which is building the Gripen pilots’ flight simulator, Thyssenkrupp’s Portuguese operations, Kristaltek and Vangest.

AICEP’s announcement does not mention the fighter competition, and a five-minute pitch is not an industrial-participation agreement. What the format offers companies outside that small group is a direct audience at what AICEP calls Sweden’s largest defence industrial group, whose range it lists as aeronautics, radar systems and maritime and land combat solutions, on a timetable that does not depend on when Lisbon opens its tender.

The market case AICEP is making

AICEP presents Sweden as an open, heavily industrialised and innovation-driven economy, with GDP of about €650 billion in 2025 and just over 10 million inhabitants, and puts Swedish R&D spending at about €23 billion in 2025, or 4 percent of GDP, roughly three-quarters of it funded by business. On defence, the agency says Swedish investment should reach about €16 billion in 2026, equal to 2.8 percent of GDP and 18 percent more than in 2025; that the government approved a new Defence Industry Strategy in 2025 centred on production capacity, technology development, supply-chain resilience and cooperation with European and NATO partners; that Swedish exports of war materiel exceeded €2.5 billion in 2025; and that the number of companies authorised to manufacture and trade war materiel has tripled since 2018.

A small baseline in the customs data

Statistics Sweden’s trade tables show how little aerospace and defence hardware moves directly from Portugal to Sweden today. Swedish imports from Portugal of goods in CN chapter 88 (aircraft, spacecraft and parts) were worth SEK 1.6 million in 2024, SEK 170,000 in 2025 and SEK 591,000 in January–July 2026; chapter 93 (arms and ammunition) shows no imports from Portugal in any month from January 2024 to July 2026. In the other direction, Sweden exported SEK 6.5 million of chapter 93 goods to Portugal in 2025, about €590,000 at the European Central Bank’s average rate for the year, and SEK 1.0 million of chapter 88 goods. The tables count only goods filed under those two chapters: they miss software and engineering services, tooling and components classified elsewhere, and parts that reach Sweden through third countries. On the recorded numbers, though, direct Portuguese sales to Sweden in both categories start from close to zero.

How to take part

Companies register through the form linked from AICEP’s agenda page. Once AICEP confirms a place, it will ask each company to commit to attending, so that places can be managed and offered to other interested firms. It is not AICEP’s only Swedish programme this autumn: the agency is also organising a mission for up to ten Portuguese life-sciences companies to Malmö and Lund on 26–27 November.