I must admit that when Saab’s latest, and as it now appears successful, suitor emerged to court the troubled Swedish carmaker, I fully expected the negotiations to run out into the sand. I doubt I was alone, and in Saab’s home town of Trollhättan employees and sub-contractors are right to breathe a tentative sigh of relief and raise a glass or two to their unlikely saviour.
What enabled Spyker to secure the deal that eluded Koenigsegg?
Perseverance perhaps. Koenigsegg and Spyker on the surface appeared very similar prospects – both small, niche, automakers with charismatic leaders bent on taking an ambitious risk but the former got cold feet while the latter crept on like the proverbial tortoise.
An election year. Had Saab gone to the wall at the start of an election year the government would have been damaged and the opposition parties, who have clearly shown with their carte blanche promises that they have no right to be trusted with the public purse, would have taken them to task.
The Swedish government and Maud Olofsson have handled this affair extremely competently in my view. But there must have been times when the old adage of “all’s well that ends well” must have tested Maud’s resolve to stick to her guns and offer no more that the 4 billion kronor EIB loan guarantees at the heart of the deal.
Tentative shoots of recovery. Just as a week is said to be a long time in politics so a financial quarter is a long time in an economic cycle. With an extra three months to get the financing on board (which I understand has to a large extent come from the bottomless pit that is Abu Dhabi’s pile of black gold revenues), Spyker were able to go the extra mile and persuade GM to grant Saab a reprieve.
Because a reprieve is all that this is. When the euphoria wears off there is much work to be done for Saab to be able to make a go of manufacturing vehicles that the market demands – the company first started producing cars in the fifties and even in its better years has struggled to make profit, while swallowing up more than 8 billion kronor in state funds of various kinds.
While just over fifty years may be a sufficiently long time for a car firm to carve a special place within the Swedish national identity, we do a disservice to Trollhättan and to Swedish industry in general by claiming that its future depends on any one firm’s survival – as the opposition Social Democrats have ventured to do on repeated occasions.
I sincerely hope that Spyker/Saab can prove the army of doubters wrong and become a winning combination. But if not then at least the interim period can be used to ensure that the Swedish automotive industry can prepare for life after if this newest dawn proves fleeting. While Saab is nominally a Swedish firm, it is not Sweden and our industrial future does not depend on it alone.
