AICEP, Portugal’s trade and investment agency, will spend a full day in Porto on 5 November telling Portuguese metalworking companies how to sell to Sweden and Finland. The session, “Em Foco Suécia e Finlândia – O Setor da Metalomecânica”, published on AICEP’s Portugal Global agenda on 14 October, runs from 10:00 to 17:30 in the Sala Tom Jobim at the Hotel da Música. It is free and organised by the Academia AICEP, and is aimed mainly at small and medium-sized firms in the metal-mechanical supply chain. The timing coincides with a sharp rise in Finnish purchases of Portuguese steel: Eurostat data show Finland imported €14.0 million of Portuguese iron and steel in the first half of 2026, against €0.9 million a year earlier.
Who is speaking, and the afternoon meetings
The morning programme opens with Carlos Pacheco, a director of the Academia AICEP. Miguel Fontoura, AICEP’s delegate in Stockholm, then gives a macroeconomic overview of both countries and their bilateral relations with Portugal. Two sessions follow from Henrik Hjelm, business developer and project manager at the consultancy EASTNET: one on supply and demand in the Swedish and Finnish metalworking industries, and one on “the most dynamic sectors for the Portuguese offer”. A round table closes the morning at 13:00. From 14:30 to 17:30 the speakers hold one-to-one speed meetings with participating companies. Slots for these are booked during the 11:15 networking break, so companies that want a meeting with the Stockholm delegate or with Hjelm need to be in the room that morning. Registration is through AICEP’s online form.
What AICEP says the Nordic buyers want
AICEP’s brief describes metalworking as “one of the pillars” of both economies. In Sweden, it says, engineering accounts for about half of industrial output, built on mechanical engineering, metallurgy, machinery, industrial equipment and heavy vehicles. Finland’s strength is large, complex machines for wood and pulp processing, with Valmet named as the segment’s historic flagship. The agency lists eight openings for Portuguese suppliers: industrial subcontracting, precision components, welded structures, tooling and moulds, renewable-energy components, mining equipment, defence components and industrial automation. Swedish and Finnish buyers, it adds, put particular weight on ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification, strict delivery times, sustainability and traceability, in-house engineering capacity and long-term relationships. AICEP says four forces are driving the Swedish industry’s transformation: electrification of vehicles and industrial equipment, automation (especially collaborative robotics), sustainability, and defence.
Defence and Sweden were also the subject of AICEP’s aerospace and defence mission to Saab and the Swedish Space Corporation on 17–18 November, whose sign-up closes on 16 October. For metalworking firms, the Porto day is the cheaper first step: no travel and no fee.
Finland: Portuguese steel bars, wire rod and structures
Finland’s import figures, published by Eurostat in its Comext database (DS-045409), show the change. Finnish imports from Portugal under HS chapter 72 (iron and steel) rose from €0.85 million in January–June 2025 to €14.0 million in January–June 2026. Most of the 2026 total was hot-rolled bars and rods (HS 7214, €9.4 million) and wire rod (HS 7213, €3.5 million). Chapter 73, articles of iron or steel, rose from €0.97 million to €9.8 million, and €5.9 million of that was structures and parts of structures (HS 7308), the welded-structures category AICEP highlights. Neither HS 7214, 7213 nor 7308 recorded any Portuguese imports into Finland in the first half of 2025. The flows are lumpy: chapter 72 arrived mostly in February (€5.1 million) and April (€6.3 million), and €6.6 million of chapter 73 came in May. That pattern points to a small number of large orders or projects, not yet a steady supply relationship. The figures also do not explain this year’s overall jump in Finnish imports from Portugal, from €147.9 million to €264.1 million in the half-year; as INE’s January–August data showed, ore concentrates account for most of that.
| Finland imports from Portugal, € million | 2024 | 2025 | H1 2025 | H1 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 72 Iron and steel | 1.79 | 1.38 | 0.85 | 14.02 |
| 73 Articles of iron or steel | 1.54 | 1.94 | 0.97 | 9.84 |
| 82 Tools, cutlery of base metal | 1.27 | 1.89 | 0.76 | 0.30 |
| 84 Machinery and mechanical appliances | 117.13 | 24.15 | 19.63 | 13.61 |
| All goods | 478.43 | 299.11 | 147.86 | 264.10 |
Source: Eurostat Comext DS-045409, reporter Finland, partner Portugal (member state of consignment), imports, value in euros; retrieved 15 October 2026. Monthly data available to June 2026.
Machinery (chapter 84) shows the opposite trend. Finland bought €117.1 million of Portuguese machinery in 2024, then €24.1 million in 2025, and €13.6 million in the first half of 2026 against €19.6 million a year earlier. The 2024 figure stands well above 2023 (€13.9 million) and looks like a one-off.
Sweden: steel articles up, machinery down from its peak
Sweden’s figures, from Statistics Sweden’s CN-level import tables (country of consignment), show a slower trend. Swedish imports of Portuguese articles of iron or steel (CN 73) rose 29% in January–July 2026, from SEK 62.5 million to SEK 80.7 million, while total Swedish chapter-73 imports from all countries fell 4%. Across the six base-metal chapters (72, 73, 74, 76, 82 and 83), Sweden bought SEK 306.6 million from Portugal in 2025, up 9% on 2024. That is about 0.2% of Sweden’s SEK 145.9 billion of imports in those chapters, which leaves plenty of room for the subcontracting role AICEP describes. Machinery is the weak spot: Portuguese chapter-84 shipments to Sweden fell from SEK 1,365 million in 2023 to SEK 1,090 million in 2024 and SEK 566 million in 2025, and were flat at SEK 310 million in January–July 2026.
| Sweden imports from Portugal, SEK million | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | Jan–Jul 2025 | Jan–Jul 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 72 Iron and steel | 76.6 | 56.2 | 58.4 | 41.0 | 26.4 |
| 73 Articles of iron or steel | 143.8 | 121.6 | 116.5 | 62.5 | 80.7 |
| 76 Aluminium | 37.8 | 30.0 | 55.0 | 35.3 | 21.9 |
| 83 Misc. articles of base metal | 52.1 | 55.0 | 53.9 | 30.1 | 29.7 |
| 84 Machinery and mechanical appliances | 1,365.4 | 1,090.2 | 565.8 | 315.0 | 309.7 |
Source: Statistics Sweden (SCB), tables ImpTotalKNAr and ImpTotalKNMan, imports by country of consignment, SEK thousand converted to SEK million; retrieved 15 October 2026. Monthly data available to July 2026; not adjusted for non-response.
What it means for Portuguese metalworkers
Both datasets show Portuguese metal goods are a small presence in the two Nordic markets. They also show Nordic buyers will take larger volumes of bars, rods and fabricated structures when a project needs them, as Finland did this spring. The Porto session lets firms ask AICEP’s Stockholm office and a market consultant which buyers are behind that demand, and whether the defence, electrification and mining work AICEP describes can become repeat business. The checklist in AICEP’s brief (ISO certification, delivery reliability, traceability and engineering capacity) is the standard Swedish and Finnish procurement teams will apply. Three caveats apply. Trade statistics record country of consignment, so goods made in Portugal but routed through another EU state can be missed, and Portuguese-routed goods made elsewhere can be counted. The Finnish 2026 surge rests on a handful of months. And AICEP’s figure for engineering’s share of Swedish output is the agency’s own characterisation, not a statistic NorthSouth HQ has checked.