Contrary to the commonly held views, the Polish industry has experienced a spectacular growth over the last 25 years. Few of us are aware of the fact that the value of our industrial manufacturing output today is four times higher than in 1990, while the export of goods increased tenfold compared to the figures for the same year.
The image of ruined factories and even entire industrial districts in some Polish cities had such a profound impact on our imagination that we have failed to notice the moment when old manufacturing plants were refurbished and new ones were built at the outskirts of both large cities and smaller towns.
The new Polish industrial revolution
For the last 25 years, Poland has experienced something of an industrial revolution. The nature of that revolution is not commonly understood today, since our point of reference remains the extensive industry of the period of real socialism, which only participated in the global division of labour to a limited extent and which concentrated on the manufacture of low-quality substitutes of Western goods. The last 25 years of industrialisation, meanwhile, have allowed our economy to join the mainstream of the global industrial revolution. Opening up the economy to the world made it possible to achieve a sudden increase in manufacturing volumes and in the diversity of the products manufactured. At the same time, along with the influx of knowledge embodied in investments, the Polish industry experienced technological and organisational changes which resulted in a significant increase of work quality and efficiency.
The Polish industry – privately owned and rationalised
How could one describe the Polish industry of today? In terms of physical assets, it is definitely much less spectacular than the industry of the socialist period. The profound rationalisation of the functions performed by enterprises as well as the significantly higher degree of automation has resulted in a smaller workforce, even though the production volumes are several times higher. The revolution in supply chain logistics has made the modern manufacturing plants much less impressive than the vast expanses occupied by the colossal factories of old. In addition, the Polish industry is now mostly in private hands. A few of the largest companies, operating in the energy, fuel and mining sector, may still be state-owned, yet the rest of the contemporary big businesses are exclusively private companies such as Synthos, Boryszew, Maspex, Can Pack, Telefonika, Mlekovita or LPP. As the privatisation process picked up the pace, the names of the gigantic enterprises of the bygone period dropped out of sight, replaced with a vast multitude of brands, whose owners are often all but unknown to us. How many of us does know that the Tytan construction foam is manufactured by the company known as Selena, based in Wrocław, or that the Ceresit foam is made by the German company Henkel at the manufacturing plant in Stąporkowo?
Maciej Bukowski and Jan Filip Staniłko at Dziennik Gazeta Prawna
