Locating Volvo: Four Plants, Four Places, Four Histories

Abstract

How did Volvo place itself in the periphery of northern Sweden? Sweden is the national home base of Volvo, the ‘core’ in relation to all other production units; it is where Volvo headquarters is located and where around 28% of the work force is employed (although Sweden constituted only 5% of the market in 2012). In Chapter 2 we saw how Volvo grew out of the industrial cluster of Gö teborg, Sweden’s second largest city, to successively integrate production units from different locales in Sweden. The corporate structure came to include core-periphery relations within Sweden, most importantly with Umeå in Norrland, the northernmost part of Sweden. By the mid-1960s Volvo had a national production system where the largest geographical distance was to its main body producer in Umeå. Today the Umeå plant has a key functional role; it is the Volvo Group’s largest heavy duty truck cab producer, the only one of its kind in Europe, and the one with the highest technological input compared to Volvo’s two similar plants worldwide (the others are in New River Valley, US and Curitiba, Brazil).