Poland number one choice in Europe for investors – HSBC

A report by HSBC, released on Monday, claimed that Poland continues to lead the EU in terms of being an attractive investment location. “It has to do with a major role Poland plays in the supply chain of German companies and the movement of goods from Eastern to Western Europe. An important driving force behind the movement of those services are also Poles living abroad who visit their homeland on several occasions. The development of tourism promotes the development of the middle class, and low-cost airlines,” explained departmental director Sebastian Szaudel of HSBC Poland. The report, however, indicated that the share of transport and tourism in Poland’s growing export economy is gradually declining. In 2010, it made up 52 percent of gross revenues, but by 2015 that figure stood at 49 percent. For business services and telecommunications, according to the report, Poland today is an attractive setting, as evidenced by the large number of customer service call centers now existing in Poland, HSBC also said. “In this respect, Poland ranks first in Europe and is still very attractive for investors. In Poland, the industry is growing by leaps and bounds, it is expected that over the next four years work in business process outsourcing and shared service centers will employ as many as 300,000 people,” said Gracjana Fiedorowicz, the communication director of the Financial Work Group.  Fiedorowicz noted that “the main scope of services provided by these service centers is [presently] customer service activities in the area of ​​IT and advanced financial and accounting processes. The report also looked at exports from a geographical perspective. It predicted that although the main markets for Polish exports have been Germany, the UK, and France, in the future Asian markets, such as China, will increasingly constitute a larger percentage of Polish exports. It explained that trends in recent years have already provided evidence for this – in 2010, exports to western European countries made up nearly 40 percent of the country’s exports, but by 2015 that figure had declined to 35 percent.