Kista
Encyclopedia
Stockholm Municipality
Stockholm Municipality or the City of Stockholm is a municipality in Stockholm County in east central Sweden. It is the largest of the 290 municipalities of the country in terms of population, but one of the smaller in terms of area, making it the most densely populated...
in Sweden
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....
. Located northwest of central Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
, Kista is divided by the Stockholm Metro
Stockholm Metro
The Stockholm Metro is a metro system in Stockholm, Sweden. The first line opened in 1950, and today the system has 100 stations in use, of which 47 are underground and 53 above ground. There are seven lines numbered from 10 to 19, in three groups identified by a color: the Green, Red and Blue lines...
blue line into a western part which is primarily a working class and middle class residential area, and an eastern part occupied by commercial ventures, mostly in the telecommunication
Telecommunication
Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...
and information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
industry. Kista hosts departments of both Royal Institute of Technology
Royal Institute of Technology
The Royal Institute of Technology is a university in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH was founded in 1827 as Sweden's first polytechnic and is one of Scandinavia's largest institutions of higher education in technology. KTH accounts for one-third of Sweden’s technical research and engineering education...
and Stockholm University
Stockholm University
Stockholm University is a state university in Stockholm, Sweden. It has over 28,000 students at four faculties, making it one of the largest universities in Scandinavia. The institution is also frequently regarded as one of the top 100 universities in the world...
(formerly jointly known as "the IT University"). Because of its ICT
Information and communication technologies
Information and communications technology or information and communication technology, usually abbreviated as ICT, is often used as an extended synonym for information technology , but is usually a more general term that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of...
industries, Kista became referred to as Chipsta or Sweden's Silicon Valley in the 1980s.
Today Kista Science City is a vibrant cluster of ICT industries with more than 20 000 people involved in developing next generation 4G mobile telecommunications and Informations and Communications solutions.
Kista is named after an old farm, still located in the area. The construction of the modern parts were started in the 1970s. Many of the streets in Kista are named after towns and famous people from Denmark
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
and Iceland
Iceland
Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...
.
Business and industry
The construction of the industrial section of Kista began in the 1970s with companies such as SRA (Svenska Radioaktiebolaget, now a part of EricssonEricsson
Ericsson , one of Sweden's largest companies, is a provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks...
), RIFA AB (later Ericsson Components AB, and later still Ericsson Microelectronics AB, and now Infineon Technologies), and IBM Svenska AB (the Swedish branch of IBM). The number of employees in Eastern Kista now ranges between 25,000 and 35,000.
Ericsson
Ericsson
Ericsson , one of Sweden's largest companies, is a provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services, covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks...
is headquartered in Kista since 2003.