Circular economy is a topic that has gained a lot of attention during the last decades. Even so, there is still a gap of research at the micro-level regarding how circular economy influences financial performance. This paper aims to investigate if circular economy has a positive impact on financial performance indicators. Furthermore, it explores whether the firm size has an impact on the level of circularity as well as if circularity has an impact on financial performance. Using a sample of Swedish companies, this paper applied the framework of 9Rs to enhance the knowledge of the level of circularity.A survey was sent to 239 SMEs within the manufacturing industry in Sweden to gather information about the expected relation between circular economy and the financial performance. Previous research points out that companies struggle to implement circularity since the systems are not yet developed. This paper cannot confirm the reasons behind the low number of companies with adopted circular processes, which could be investigated further by other researchers. However, it was found that most companies are still focusing on sustainability and only a few companies have implemented circularity in their business model. Furthermore, firm size does not have an impact on the level of circularity which could be due to either that the majority of participating companies is classified as small or that most companies are still linear. At last, the analysis results show that circular economy has a positive influence on the financial KPIs sales, return on assets and economic value added and that the higher level of circularity, the greater the impact.

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The cradle to cradle (C2C) is a sustainable business strategy that mimics the natural recycling cycle and waste is reused, the question of when and how to apply the C2C concept successfully in business is still controversial. This thesis takes Huawei, the leading enterprise in the mobile communication industry, as an example, and to investigate the challenges for Chinese mobile communication companies in implementing an effective C2C strategy to achieve a sustainable development. This study used the semi-structured interviews in the qualitative data collection method to interview both Huawei and China Telecommunications’ managers. Data analysis shows that for the electronics industry with low recycling rate and high pollution, Huawei still faces many challenges in adopting the C2C strategy，which includes alloy recycling, recycling of electronic products in consumers' hands, disassembly problems, and recycling of electronic products by value, Another challenge is the mismatch between C2C evaluation mechanism and China's mobile communications industry. Only fully considered cradle to cradle, cradle to Grave, and Life cycle, the sustainable mode of the mobile communications industry would be reached.