By Ojārs Kalniņš, Director, Latvian Institute (www.li.lv)
During Latvia’s recent boom years, the country’s exports never managed to exceed its imports. However, last year, during the peak of the world economic crisis, they finally did. What happened? A look at some of Latvia’s top exporting companies offers some surprising clues.
At the end of 2009, nearly 30 highly successful and respected Latvian companies competed for top prizes in the annual Latvian Export and Innovation Award competition. One would think that the words “highly successful” and “economic crisis” should not apply in the same year, no less in the same country, but in 2009 Latvia experienced both situations.
At the invitation of the Ministry of Economics and the Latvian Investment and Development Agency, I participated in a jury that had the rare privilege of seeing firsthand how some of Latvia’s most innovative exporters are defying expectations on a routine basis.
Some may rely on numbers and macroeconomic factors to explain success, but when you visit a company like Dores fabrika Ltd. near Cēsis, you realize that tradition, innovation and integrity remain an unbeatable formula. Dores fabrika applies ingenious, new technologies to the time-honoured tradition of building log houses. The result is a smart series of stunning, eco-friendly and energy-efficient homes that dazzle the eye and warm the cockles of any heart. Even the Norwegians, global leaders in log house construction, have been impressed.
Norwegians, Swedes and Danes are also impressed by the books that Livonia Print Ltd. is producing. So much so, that almost 90% of what this state-of-the-art printing plant and bindery produces in Riga ends up on Scandinavian bookshelves. It would perhaps be undiplomatic to mention which royal families regularly turn to Livonia Print to print their life stories, but clearly the quality of this company’s products is up to regal standards.
When the Scandinavian kings and queens visit some of their leading manufacturers, chances are that the red carpet has been laid down over Prime Composite concrete floors produced by Primekss Ltd. Primekss has literally re-invented the concrete floor, making it thinner, tougher, more durable and totally seamless. The fact that the production of Primekss concrete floors generates 30-50% less CO2 emissions makes them even more popular in the eco-conscious Baltic Sea region. Latvians, Estonians and Poles have been the first continental Europeans to start building with Primekss concrete, but sooner or later, the rest of “Old Europe” should follow.
However, it is not only Scandinavians who are upping the numbers of Latvian exports. It appears that Italians are the prime consumers of Monterigo cheese, produced by Limbažu piens Ltd. This hard cheese is aged for 18 months and is remarkably similar to something that looks, smells and tastes like – but can’t be called – parmesan cheese. So much so, that the Italians are re-packaging it and exporting it to the UK. (Don’t tell the Brits!)
While most of Latvia’s exporters are doing well in the EU and many continue to expand their traditional markets in Russia and other parts of the former USSR, one Latvian company is beginning to clean-up, so to speak, in China. Stenders Ltd. has 190 franchise stores around the world, which sell the company’s distinctive soaps, bath balls and body cosmetics, and 20 of them are in China. Not only is the market huge, the Chinese prefer to purchase their bars of Stenders’ soap in “Great Wall’’ sizes.
Notwithstanding the global success of many Latvian exporters, one Riga-based company is generating out-of-this-world sales results. Bruker Baltic Ltd. specializes in the development of, “high-pure germanium and cadmium-zinc-tellurium detectors.” I you don’t know what that means, then I don’t either, but Bruker has designed its devices for NASA and the European Space Agency, and is presently working on a technical innovation for the next probe to the planet Mercury.
Speaking of long distances, when the film hero E.T. had to “phone home,” he had problems making connections. While the Latvian makers of B-Phone may not be able to keep you in touch with other planets, they can help you listen in on your baby from anywhere your mobile phone service can reach. Their innovative baby monitoring device calls your mobile phone any time your child moves or makes a sound. You can talk to the toddler as well. The wives and husbands in our jury immediately thought of some other applications for this mobile monitoring device, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.
Of course, there are many other enterprising Latvian exporters with fascinating success stories.
