AICEP, Portugal’s trade and investment agency, is organising a business mission to Sweden on 26 and 27 November for Portuguese life-sciences companies, together with Invest in Skåne, the regional investment-promotion agency for Sweden’s southernmost county. Announced by AICEP’s Sweden office on 2 October, the programme concentrates on four areas — oncology, cardiovascular, gene therapies and clinical trials — and is designed to set up business contacts and explore internationalisation and cooperation opportunities in the Swedish market.
The mission is capped at ten Portuguese companies, with one representative per company, and participants pay their own travel and accommodation. Interested companies have to send an expression of interest by 8 October 2026 to AICEP (Maria.Borges@portugalglobal.pt). Once a place is confirmed, each company sends a short presentation and the details of its representative, which AICEP will circulate to Swedish companies ahead of the meetings.
Two days in Malmö and Lund
Day one is in Malmö: B2B meetings between Portuguese and Swedish companies and a bilateral session with Invest in Skåne. AICEP lists the subjects as supply chains, technology development, research and development, knowledge transfer and joint projects. Day two is given over to visits to R&D bodies, academic institutions, clusters and companies in the Malmö and Lund area, including the Ideon Science Park and Lund University.
Skåne is the Swedish half of Medicon Valley, the life-sciences cluster that straddles the Øresund with Greater Copenhagen. According to Invest in Skåne figures quoted by AICEP, the region hosts 820 life-sciences companies, with particular strengths in medtech, health tech and biotech. AICEP also points to the research infrastructure around them — the European Spallation Source (ESS), the MAX IV synchrotron laboratory and SciLifeLab — and notes that Ideon alone gathers more than 400 companies.
The starting point in Swedish trade data
The trade figures show how small Portugal’s footprint in Swedish life sciences still is. Statistics Sweden’s import table by product and trading partner, updated on 28 September with July data, records SEK 40.4 million (about €3.7 million) of pharmaceutical products (CN chapter 30) imported from Portugal in January–July 2026, up 5.4% from SEK 38.3 million a year earlier. Almost all of it — SEK 37.3 million — is medicaments in measured doses or retail packs (heading 3004). Against Sweden’s SEK 49.4 billion of pharmaceutical imports from all countries over the same seven months, Portugal’s share is about 0.08%.
Medical technology is moving faster from a lower base. Swedish imports of Portuguese medical, surgical and dental instruments (heading 9018) more than doubled to SEK 21.4 million from SEK 10.0 million, already above the SEK 16.9 million recorded for the whole of 2025, and orthopaedic appliances (heading 9021) rose to SEK 6.9 million from SEK 3.1 million. Adding dressings, other pharmaceutical preparations and laboratory analysis instruments, the life-sciences lines NorthSouth HQ tracked come to roughly SEK 69.7 million (about €6.4 million) for January–July, 31% more than a year earlier. These are small flows in which a single tender or distributor order can swing a heading, and for trade inside the EU Statistics Sweden records the country goods were dispatched from, which is not always where they were made.
Swedish capital is already moving the other way
The mission also runs against the direction of most recent corridor deals in the sector. In September, Nasdaq Stockholm-listed AddLife completed its acquisition of Unicam Sistemas Analíticos, the Lisbon-area laboratory-equipment distributor that represents Thermo Scientific in Portugal. Earlier this year AICEP itself ran the mirror image of next month’s trip, bringing Swedish and Danish life-sciences companies to Portugal. November’s mission is the Portuguese side going north.
Why this matters for the corridor
For Portuguese life-sciences companies, Sweden is a market that is hard to read from Lisbon: healthcare is run and procured by the country’s regions, and much of the research activity is organised around universities and science parks rather than around a single national buyer. A ten-seat, self-funded mission is a modest instrument. But the focus on Skåne, and on four specialised fields rather than on “health” in general, points companies towards the routes foreign firms usually take into the Swedish ecosystem — research partnerships, clinical-trial work, component supply and joint development — rather than direct sales. The trade data say Portugal starts almost from zero in Swedish pharmaceuticals and has only just begun to register in medical devices. The deadline to apply is next Thursday.
Sources: AICEP / Portugal Global, “AICEP leva empresas portuguesas de Life Sciences à Suécia” (2 October 2026), including Invest in Skåne figures; Statistics Sweden (SCB), imports by CN heading and trading partner, table ImpTotalKNMan, values in SEK thousand, updated 28 September 2026; European Central Bank euro reference rates (January–July 2026 average, SEK 10.83 per euro). Figures for 2026 are provisional.