It is important that organizations today focus on continuous improvements in order to face the growing competition in the world. A company needs a corporate culture that supports and encourages the employees to be creative and innovative in their work. This is necessary for the company if they are striving towards continuous learning and development within their organization.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how the culture differences between Sweden and China affect Sandvik AB. We will also study how the company manages continuous improvements and what consequences culture differences have on their work.

Our paper is a single case study at Sandvik AB in Sweden and China. We have visited Sandvik in Sandviken to conduct a series of interviews with employees of different position within the company and with dissimilar work tasks. We have chosen this procedure to get different angles from the respondents and to acquire depth in our research. After the company visit in Sandviken we had appointments with personal at Sandvik in Beijing, Langfang and Shanghai. These employees also had different position and work tasks within the company.

After finished study, we can make the conclusion that there exist several culture differences between Sweden and China. Most of these differences can be connected to the national culture. Sandvik where founded in Sweden and therefore they have a Swedish corporate culture. Today the company is a multinational corporation that operates business at the Chinese market and thereby in the Chinese national culture. Because of this situation, we think that it is important that Sandvik finds a balance between the corporate and national culture.

Today, a new China is emerging. The country has one of the fastest growing economies in the world, this having and will continue to have consequences on Sandvik AB: s organization. In China 20 million students are graduated from the university today and this result in harder competition on the labour market. When more people getting an education, particularly in China, price on knowledge will decrease. The consequence of this will be that the demand of creativity and innovative thinking is rising, especially in Sweden where the labour cost is significantly higher.