Japanese investment in Poland reaches new level

2005 saw over two dozen massive Japanese investments. Observers say that Japanese ventures this year could double in this country.

Global giants Toyota, Sharp, Toshiba and Bridgestone are just a few of the Japanese companies planning to increase their investments in Poland. They are focusing on Special Economic Zones in the central and southern regions of the country. These SEZ’s offer tax and land purchasing incentives for foreign companies. Last year Japanese conglomerates invested close to 300 million dollars. They intend to invest three times more this year. Investment analyst Jan Fior from the Adam Smith Institute thinks that a domino effect of successive Japanese companies following each other to Poland has yet to reach its peak.

“Poland is a good place for them due to two reasons: First that we belong to the European Union, before that Japanese investors weren’t interested in investing in Poland. Secondly, we have a lot of engineers, plenty of well educated people in high tech and especially in the IT sector, willing, able and ready to work for global companies.”

The central city of Łódź has managed to attract Japanese investors to SEZ’s in the region. Blazej Moder from the Lodz SEZ says that his office has even created a Japanese language website designed to catch the attention of potential Japanese investors.

“We see the global trend of globalization of bog investments from Asia and Japan that’s why we prepared our website in Japanese. So far we have one Japanese investment. It is a company called Fuji Film project. They have a new plant of printing labels and assembling machines. It is a quite fresh and new investment in October this year. Fuji Film has employed close to 150 people and they are trying to extend their activity in the zone.”

Investment analysts suggest that Poland is ripe for Japanese investment and that Warsaw has a competitive edge over Tokyo.

“The Polish market is already flooded with Japanese products. Cars, computer laptops, notebooks, 60% are Japanese related. The Japanese interest in the Polish is already big and will get bigger. But some of those products could be made in Poland under Japanese brands. We can compete with the Japanese because in high tech we are more original, more creative than the Japanese.”

Several Japanese auto manufacturers are also interested in the special economic zone in Lodz. Planned investments could reach close to 25 million euro.
Source:By Bogdan Zaryn, polskieradio.pl