kad
No, it is not popular. The Germans are in my opinion the most competitive European nation.Now, don"t get me wrong, they apply everywhere. Germany is a big country after all. For instance: I have talked to one of the admission directors from ESADE and he told me, that 1/3 of ALL applications they receive are from Germany. That's what popular is all about. The Germans that I know either have only a vague idea of what SSE stands for or have never even heard of it (and considering which university I go to, they are supposed to be elite). Somehow, they are more oriented towards other universities. BUT I must say, in one of the threads I've read some guy said that significant part of the internationals in his specialization (CF) come from Germany.
The quote by itself does not mean a thing, 90% of the 40% mentioned may be from Scandinavia and 50% of the rest may be from Germany, it still doen't say anything about the absolute numbers. If you know German and read the SSE threads in the German forums, you'll see what I mean. But you can trust me about that, SSE is nowhere near as popular as LSE or HEC in Germany. If the things stay the way they are now, I sincerely doubt SSE will ever catch up compared to other universities.