Which companies do Swedes trust the most?

Medieakademin’s yearly trust survey measures the level of trust Swedes have in different institutions, companies and political parties. 

In the 2025 edition of the survey, 72 percent of Swedes said that they had “a lot” or “quite a lot” of trust in Systembolaget.

This places Systembolaget second place in the trust survey overall, just behind the police, who landed on 74 percent, and ahead of major Swedish institutions such as the Church of Sweden (47 percent), the Tax Agency (65 percent) and even the royal family (49 percent).

Systembolaget was also top of the “companies” section of the survey by a good margin. 

IN DEPTH: Why do Swedes love Systembolaget so much?

Which other companies do Swedes trust the most, and which came bottom of the scale?

Ikea came second in the companies section, 12 percentage points behind Systembolaget on 60 percent.

There was another significant drop in percentage points between Ikea and supermarket chain Ica, which came in third place with 45 percent, followed by Volvo at 43 percent.

Low-price supermarket chain Willys, which was included in the survey for the first time in 2025, was fifth with 39 percent, followed by Coop, another supermarket chain, in sixth place at 36 percent.

Power company Vattenfall, owned by the Swedish state, came next in seventh place with 31 percent, followed by Volkswagen (23 percent), Postnord and SAS (both 22 percent).

At the bottom of the table was state-owned rail company SJ (17 percent), followed by H&M on 15 percent.

The clothing giant was the subject of a high-profile Aftonbladet investigation in 2023 which showed that many of the second-hand clothes collected by the company for recycling in fact ended up in areas where clothes are commonly dumped or burned.

Tesla came next in 13th place with a 9 percent trust rating, perhaps due to the fact that Swedish metalworkers’ union IF Metall has been striking against the company – which refuses to sign a collective bargaining agreement – since October 27th, 2023.

Tesla’s owner, Elon Musk, had a trust rating of just five percent, placing him at the bottom of Medieakademin’s list of “international opinion-leaders”.

X, the social media formerly known as Twitter which Musk bought in 2022 and rebranded in 2023, scored even lower than Tesla with a trust rating of just 4 percent.

Finally, Northvolt placed bottom of the companies table on just two percent, putting it lower than all institutions, political parties, companies and media organisations on the list.

The crisis-hit battery maker had the same score as TikTok, which placed bottom in trust among social media companies, and was only 1 percentage point higher than Russian president Vladimir Putin, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Northvolt laid off more than 1,000 workers in October 2024, its CEO Peter Karlsson resigned a month later in November, and the company has applied for so-called Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to its struggling finances, with restructuring expected to be complete in the first quarter of this year.

It scored even lower than US president Donald Trump, who had a trust rating of 8 percent among Swedes this year.