The Polish Market: Is It Really All So Wonderful?

An author's note from Startup Harbour.

If you read enough reports about Poland, you eventually begin to wonder whether you live in the same country they describe.

The numbers are excellent. GDP grew by 3.6% in 2025. The European Commission expects another 3.5% in 2026. Unemployment sits close to 3%. Warsaw is full of construction cranes. Foreign companies keep opening offices. Technology conferences are packed. Salaries have risen enormously compared with twenty years ago. citeturn0search3

And yet, when we speak with founders and owners of small Polish companies, the mood often sounds much less triumphant.

Margins feel tight. Hiring is expensive. Taxes and regulation feel heavier. Customers negotiate harder. Growth feels difficult. A surprising number of entrepreneurs hear that the Polish economy is booming and quietly ask themselves: if everything is going so well, why doesn't it feel that way from here?

We asked ourselves the same question.

This article is our attempt to understand it.

First, the Good News Is Real

We should begin here because otherwise this becomes another fashionable essay about how official statistics supposedly lie.

They don't.

Poland's economic transformation is extraordinary. Anyone old enough to remember the country in the 1990s does not need a chart to understand the scale of it. Roads, airports, cities, salaries, consumption, housing, technology, retail, exports — almost every physical expression of economic development changed within one generation.

The European Commission estimates that the economy expanded 3.6% in 2025 and forecasts 3.5% growth in 2026. Private consumption remains resilient and investment is being supported by the final wave of EU recovery funding. citeturn0search3

Poland has become a serious European economy.

The question is what kind of economy it has become — and who captures the value created inside it.

99.8% of Polish Companies Are SMEs

That number appears in almost every presentation about entrepreneurship in Poland.

In 2024 there were 2.37 million active non-financial enterprises in the country. SMEs represented 99.8% of them. Microbusinesses alone accounted for 97.2%. citeturn0search2

It sounds like an economy built around entrepreneurs.

Look at output rather than company count and the picture changes.

PARP's recent reporting puts the SME contribution at roughly 46–47% of Polish GDP generated by enterprises, depending on the reference year and measure. Microbusinesses — despite representing almost every company you see in the registry — generated about 28% of GDP in the 2022 data used by PARP's 2025 report. citeturn0search5

The OECD describes the structural issue even more clearly: Poland's business sector is dominated numerically by microfirms, while large firms create roughly half of business value added. Poland also has a smaller medium-sized-company segment than the OECD average, pointing to a persistent difficulty in scaling businesses from small to medium and from medium to large. citeturn1search6

This is the first clue.

Poland has an enormous number of entrepreneurs. It has been less successful at turning enough of their companies into substantial domestic businesses.

The Missing Middle

We know this problem personally.

Startup Harbour works with founders and SMEs. These are businesses where the owner still sells, recruits, checks invoices and occasionally fixes the website at midnight. Growing from five people to fifteen is difficult. Growing from fifteen to fifty changes the organisation completely. At one hundred employees, the company needs management systems that bear little resemblance to the company the founder originally created.

Poland creates companies easily. Scaling them is harder.

The OECD's description of a relatively weak medium-sized-company segment matters because medium businesses are the bridge between entrepreneurship and capital formation. They are where a local services firm can become a national company, where a manufacturer can build an export brand, and where a software house can begin owning a product instead of selling hours.

When too few companies cross that bridge, the economy can grow while the typical entrepreneur remains small.

Then There Is Foreign Capital

Foreign investment was one of the engines of Poland's success.

German manufacturers, American technology companies, French retailers, Dutch holding companies and hundreds of other investors brought capital, management knowledge, supply chains and access to international markets. Millions of Polish workers learned inside those organisations. Entire cities benefited from the arrival of shared-service centres, factories and R&D operations.

The scale, however, is worth understanding.

Eurostat data for 2021 showed that foreign-controlled enterprises accounted for 32.1% of employment in Poland's market-producer economy — one of the highest shares in the EU. citeturn1search12

Eurostat's later data show how disproportionate the economic weight of foreign-controlled firms can be across Europe: in 2022 they generated 24% of EU business-market value added despite representing only about 1% of enterprises. Slovakia's foreign-controlled share of value added reached 52%, while France stood at 16% and Germany at 17%. citeturn1search0

Poland belongs to the part of Europe where foreign capital has played an unusually large role in the modernisation of the economy.

That has been enormously beneficial. It also means that a meaningful share of the value created here belongs to shareholders somewhere else.

PLN 135.2 Billion

This is one of the numbers that changed the way we looked at the Polish growth story.

According to the National Bank of Poland, foreign direct investors earned PLN 135.2 billion on capital invested in Poland in 2024. That was equivalent to 3.7% of Polish GDP. citeturn1search38

Of that:

This should not be read as PLN 135 billion “leaving Poland”. Reinvested earnings, by definition, stay invested in the business. Dividends can flow abroad; they can also ultimately belong to complex ownership structures. The statistic measures the return earned by foreign direct investors, not a truck carrying Polish money across the border.

Still, ownership matters.

GDP measures production inside a country. It does not tell you who owns the companies producing it.

Those two questions can produce very different emotional experiences of the same economy.

Imagine Two Economies Growing at Exactly 4%

In Economy A, most of the growth comes from locally owned companies. Their profits accrue primarily to domestic owners, who hire locally, invest locally, buy other companies and become angel investors. A successful founder creates another generation of founders around them.

In Economy B, much of the growth comes from subsidiaries of international corporations. Workers receive salaries locally. Suppliers receive contracts. The government receives taxes. The country becomes richer. The parent company receives part of the return on capital.

Both economies can report exactly the same GDP growth.

Their long-term accumulation of domestic capital can be very different.

Poland's development model leaned heavily on Economy B because in the 1990s Poland had something Western Europe possessed in abundance and we did not: capital.

It was probably the right trade.

Thirty years later, the question changes. How long should an economy remain primarily excellent at attracting somebody else's capital before it becomes equally good at creating its own?

We Are Still Surprisingly Low-Tech in Places

Poland's reputation as a technology country can be misleading if you spend your time around startups.

We have excellent developers. We have ElevenLabs, ICEYE, CD Projekt, Allegro, InPost, Booksy and Docplanner. Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław and the Tri-City contain sophisticated technology communities.

Zoom out to the whole economy and the picture becomes less flattering.

Eurostat's comparison of manufacturing found that high-tech industries generated only 4.7% of Polish manufacturing value added in 2020, the lowest share among the EU countries reported in that comparison. The EU average was 16%; Belgium was at 26.3% and France at 17.2%. citeturn1search36

A separate Eurostat measure showed ICT representing only 3.0% of Polish employment in 2021, compared with 5.6% in Estonia and 6.1% in Ireland. citeturn1search8

The data are not current enough to describe Poland in 2026 perfectly — technology has moved quickly since 2020–21 — but they reveal the base from which we are moving.

We are very good at talking about AI. A large part of the economy still makes its money in much more traditional ways.

So Why Can GDP Grow While an SME Owner Feels Terrible?

Because “the economy” is an average of things that do not experience the same reality.

A defence contractor receiving large public orders can grow while a small marketing agency loses clients.

A foreign manufacturer exporting into Europe can increase production while a domestic retailer watches consumers trade down.

A bank can report record nominal profits while a thirty-person company absorbs another increase in wages, energy, accounting and compliance costs.

Public investment financed by EU funds can lift GDP without immediately improving the order book of the typical private SME.

The European Commission explicitly says Poland's current growth is being supported by private consumption and a high level of EU-funded investment. citeturn0search3

There is no contradiction here. There are simply different Polands sitting inside the same GDP figure.

Large Companies Are Supposed to Be More Productive

We should be careful with the temptation to blame large corporations.

Large companies generating a disproportionate share of value added is not uniquely Polish. Across the EU in 2023, firms with more than 249 employees represented only 0.2% of enterprises but produced 49% of business value added. citeturn1search10

Scale creates productivity. Large companies can invest in automation, software, R&D, management, international sales and expensive equipment. They should produce more value per employee than a three-person local business.

The concern begins when the path from small to large becomes too narrow.

The OECD specifically identifies scaling as a Polish challenge. That is a more useful diagnosis than saying big companies have “too much”.

Poland needs more companies capable of joining them.

The State Is Another Giant Customer, Employer and Owner

There is another part of the Polish economy that founders encounter constantly but startup presentations rarely discuss: the state.

Energy, banking, insurance, transport, defence and infrastructure all contain large enterprises with significant state ownership or influence. Add central government, municipalities, hospitals, universities and public procurement and the state becomes an enormous participant in economic life.

That role can be productive. Infrastructure built by the state makes private business possible. Defence investment creates technology demand. Universities create talent.

It can also change the competitive environment when capital, talent and contracts concentrate around very large organisations that operate under different constraints from an ordinary SME.

We do not think the useful question is whether the state is “too big” in the abstract. The useful question is whether a productive private company has enough room to become much larger.

Poland's Great Achievement Was Catching Up

For three decades, Poland had a beautifully clear economic mission.

Catch the West.

Build roads. Modernise factories. Join European supply chains. Bring in foreign capital. Raise productivity. Reduce unemployment. Improve infrastructure. Give young Poles jobs that did not require emigrating.

It worked far better than most people expected.

The next mission is less obvious.

Poland is no longer poor enough for cheap labour to be a compelling national strategy. We are not yet rich enough to live comfortably from accumulated capital, global brands and intellectual property.

We are somewhere in between.

The Next Polish Growth Story Has to Be About Ownership

This is the part we care about most at Startup Harbour.

We want more InPosts. More Allegros. More CD Projekts. More industrial companies whose logos nobody in Warsaw recognises but whose products dominate a narrow global category. More technology companies where the Polish office is the headquarters rather than the delivery centre.

We want a twenty-person Polish company to have a believable path to becoming a two-hundred-person company.

Because salaries make a country wealthier. Factories make it wealthier. Foreign investment makes it wealthier.

Ownership compounds.

A locally owned successful company creates founders, executives, investors and capital that can finance the next company. It buys services from smaller businesses. It acquires competitors. Its former employees become angels. Its founders become LPs. One success can create an ecosystem around itself.

Is the Polish Market Really All So Wonderful?

Yes. And no.

It is a remarkably successful market if you compare Poland with the country it was thirty years ago.

It is a large, growing and increasingly sophisticated European economy. For an international company looking for customers, engineers, manufacturing or a Central European base, Poland deserves serious attention. We wrote an entire guide to the Polish market explaining why.

But the celebration becomes less convincing when GDP growth is treated as proof that every part of the economy is healthy.

99.8% of companies are SMEs. Too few become large companies. Foreign capital captures a substantial part of the value created by some of Poland's most productive businesses. The state occupies an important part of the commanding heights of the economy. Our manufacturing base remains less high-tech than the startup headlines suggest. And many entrepreneurs operate in a completely different economic weather system from the one described by national GDP.

We don't see that as a reason for pessimism.

We see it as the job description for the next thirty years.

The first Polish economic miracle was about catching up.

The second should be about building companies we own.

A note on the numbers

This essay combines current macroeconomic data with structural business data that are published with a lag. Sources include the European Commission, Eurostat, OECD, National Bank of Poland and PARP. Different datasets use different definitions — GDP contribution, business-economy value added and foreign-controlled market producers should not be treated as interchangeable measures. Where older structural data are used, the reference year is stated. Last updated: September 2026.

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