Ulf Dahlin

Ulf Dahlin, CEO of Energi Sverige, has a strong background in economics, having worked as a stockbroker and options broker with Swedbank. He was with the bank for eight years before establishing his first start-up business. “I worked in banking until 1992 when I started a new firm together with my father-in-law. It was a wholesaler of flowers, pottery, and things like that—importing flowers from Holland, Ecuador, Kenya, Israel, all over Denmark, through a lot of intermediary stores in Sweden. It was a completely new business, completely new line of work, but it was a great education starting up the firm, dealing with contracts and government.

“Then I started up in something called Fyrstad Kraft, which was an energy business, in 1997. They didn’t know anything about stock exchange, which was why I was brought on board. We were building up a new type of company—managing risks, and purchasing energy assets for our end-users and owners. We started doing that in 2002–2003 before we had a merger with another company called Östkraft, forming Bixia; so I was responsible for the merger with that new company. In 2007 I got a new opportunity to start up Energi Sverige.”

Having been responsible for the establishment and growth of several businesses, Ulf was a natural choice for leading Energi Sverige. “I’ve started up other companies, even in the banking business, starting up new departments. The thread that runs through my career is building things; building up companies and making them grow. I had a lot of experience in what to do and what not to do. You make a lot of mistakes during the long run, and you learn about how not to do it again.