Poland - Real Estate - Emerging Europe Has Upside - by William Boston
"In 1990, Jacek Szwajcowski disregarded the advice of friends and gave up a prospering engineering business to invest €3,000 of his own money in his mother-in-law's pharmacy. Soon he was supplying a handful of local pharmacies in Lodz (pronounced "Wootch") with medicines and his wholesale pharmaceuticals business was born. Today he is running a 4.4 billion-zloty ($1.92 billion) wholesale and retail pharmacy business with a 20% share of the Polish market. As Polska Grupa Farmaceutyczna SA grew, he built 12 distribution centers throughout Poland. Now he is about to expand into Central and Eastern Europe.
"We want to have 20% market share in each of the main Eastern and Central European countries in the next five years," Mr. Szwajcowski says in his office overlooking a warehouse adorned with the initials PGF. Mr. Szwajcowski is a perfect example of why frustrated property investors haven't given up on Central and Eastern Europe as the U.S.-led economic slowdown has begun to hit emerging markets. As economies in Eastern Europe have grown, developers have been building everything from highways, warehouses and factories to high-rise apartment buildings, hotels and shopping centers to meet the demand."
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