Juha Rautalahti, head of Finpro Poland, a Finnish trade promotion organization, talks with Ewa Hancock.

What are Finland's main exports to Poland?
Forest industry products have traditionally featured prominently among Finland's exports to Poland. Among these exports, paper and board for the printing and packaging industries have comprised the biggest single product group. However, machinery and equipment manufacturers as a whole are the largest industry exporting to Poland, and in this sector telecommunications equipment is the leading single product group. As usual, petrochemical products and iron and steel also play a significant role in our exports.

How would you rate trade and investment cooperation between Finland and Poland?
Bilateral trade has been growing at a brisk rate of 20-30 percent annually. Finland has a surplus in trade with Poland, but Poland's exports to Finland have also been growing by around 10-15 percent per annum. The overall value of trade between Finland and Poland in the whole of 2007 is projected at 2.3 billion euros. Poland's main export product is coal, but the share of machine industry products is constantly growing. As far as investment activity is concerned, Finnish companies have by far been more active in investing in Poland, compared with Polish investment activity in Finland. This is mainly due to the size of Poland's market, compared with Finland's. There are about 75 Finnish companies operating in Poland with their own production here out of the total number of over 200 Finnish companies registered in Poland.

What are the advantages of doing business with Poland?
Poland's location in the middle of Central Europe makes Poland an excellent platform for developing business, and the size of the Polish market offers a good base for many types of entrepreneurial activities. Now that Poland is a member of the European Union, these benefits are even more obvious. Poland has an educated and skilled work force as well, though some people have left the country to work on other labor markets within the EU.

What are the main difficulties and obstacles for Finns doing business in Poland?
Finnish businesspeople face a less transparent and more time-consuming business environment in Poland when dealing with various authorities, but I believe that this will gradually change for the better. Obviously, some of these problems have to do with language problems and therefore solving unclear issues is more time consuming. Sometimes if companies are short on capital, this results in long payment times and slow money transfer compared with the practice in Finland. Luckily, this has also been improving since the 1990s. One potential risk for the Finns is that Finnish companies are not always aware of the size of the Polish market and the fierce competition that exists here in comparison to Scandinavia and the Baltic states. This may cause problems if they fail to muster enough resources, be it capital or human resources.