The certification companies are getting more and more agressive. The other day there was a note in the paper that the CE mark will no longer be valid and that all product will again require the S-mark. That sounded really strange, and when I looked it up it turns out that Semko (the holder of the S-mark) had issued a press release about a re-release of the S-mark. It was very agressively written and only in the closing paragraph did it indicated that the CE mark remains the only legal marking. The whole thing was just marketing hype to inform that the S mark now only means that the product meet the European requirements, not that it meets the Swedish - in some cases stricter -requirements.

The English press release is written in a different, softer language. Wonder why...
http://www.etlsemko.com/Semko/semkoupdates/usenglish/summer_03_smark.htm

Hmmm...... So the S-mark is now being applied as virtually an independent laboratory's approval of an item meeting CE standards by the sound of it.

If the Swedish people had already come to respect the S-mark as a symbol of often higher Swedish standards, I don't see that this is doing them any favors.