Moving with the world

Polish managers realize that globalization is slowly beginning to affect their businesses, but are not as electrified by this phenomenon as their colleagues worldwide, shows a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). "Although Polish CEOs are in general positive about globalization, their attitude is somewhat lukewarm," says the chief economic advisor at PwC, professor Witold Orłowski.

Polish CEOs and their international counterparts say over-regulation is the main obstacle to globalization. Surprisingly, Polish managers do not perceive business conditions in Poland, such as labor costs or taxes, as a large obstacle. "They still see many areas with potential here," says Orłowski.

Polish managers differ from the worldwide CEOs in terms of their direction of expansion. Most of them look for new opportunities in the CEE region, while some also turn to Western Europe. Very few are interested in the Far East, which is actually the focus of managers from Western Europe and the US. The driving force of Polish companies' expansion is the search for new customers, with cost-cutting an issue of minor importance. This is also what analysts see in the worldwide view of globalization: "The principal change that we are seeing is that globalization has moved from something driven by cost savings to become a way to enter new markets," says the president of PwC Polska, George Johnstone.

With globalization comes another buzzword: "complexity." Globalization forces companies to adjust to new conditions. In order to increase the company's value, Polish managers often go for launching new products and participating in mergers and acquisitions, which is also a worldwide trend. Complexity often results in the increase of operational costs and a drop in income. The Polish tool to fight these effects is structural reorganization of the company, whereas worldwide the trend is to use new IT solutions that minimize the negative results of complexity.