The SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, in Swedish

Swedish language

Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...

 SP Sveriges Tekniska Forskningsinstitut, is a joint stock company

Joint stock company

A joint-stock company is a type of corporation or partnership involving two or more individuals that own shares of stock in the company...

, fully owned by the Swedish

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 government

Government

Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...

. It was formerly known as Statens Provningsanstalt (Government Testing Institute), thus the abbreviation SP. The company has its headquarters in Borås

Borås

Borås is a locality and the seat of Borås Municipality, Västra Götaland County, Sweden. It had 63,441 inhabitants in 2005.- Geography :Borås is located at the point of two crossing railways, among them the railway between Gothenburg and Kalmar, and is often considered the Swedish city gaining the...

 and employs 1000 persons.

Business areas include, among other things, applied research

Applied research

Applied research is a form of systematic inquiry involving the practical application of science. It accesses and uses some part of the research communities' accumulated theories, knowledge, methods, and techniques, for a specific, often state, business, or client driven purpose...

, technical studies and investigations, quality assurance

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance, or QA for short, is the systematic monitoring and evaluation of the various aspects of a project, service or facility to maximize the probability that minimum standards of quality are being attained by the production process...

s, standardization and certification

Certification

Certification refers to the confirmation of certain characteristics of an object, person, or organization. This confirmation is often, but not always, provided by some form of external review, education, assessment, or audit...

.