Dr. Mostafa Malki is a professor at UT-Rio Grande Valley and executive director for business development at America’s Additive Foundry Center for Advanced Manufacturing Innovation and Cyber Systems. He is also the founder of Aaron Economic Consulting.

Dr. Malki recently gave a presentation about business opportunities tied to additive manufacturing at the eBridge Center for Business & Commercialization in downtown Brownsville. During the presentation he said there is a great opportunity for the Rio Grande Valley to forge partnerships with manufacturing and technology companies from Sweden.

The Rio Grande Guardian interviewed Professor Malki at the conclusion of his presentation.

Asked to tell Guardian readers and viewers about Sweden, Malki said: “Where should I begin? There’s so much to say about Sweden.”

Malki said Sweden is a relatively small country, population wise, but area wise, is very big. It has a population of about ten million.

“It has very low population density, but it has also very big presence in terms of industries and innovation and so on. It's one of the top countries in the world in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship and so on,” Malki said.

“If we can calculate a ratio of multi-billion-dollar corporations per capita, they are probably the number one country. There are a lot of very big companies that are household names, Volvo, IKEA and Ericsson and so on that are Swedish companies. There are some that are also very big multinational companies, but they're not very well known because they do business to business type of work.”

Malki visits Sweden a lot. “It’s a very fascinating country, for a very small country to be able to be a major player in manufacturing industry and innovation,” he said.


Editor's Note: Go to the Rio Grande Guardian International News Service website to read the full story.

Go to www.riograndeguardian.com to read the latest border news stories and watch the latest news videos.