Over one-third of business services sector companies operating in the Katowice agglomeration are specialized in IT services. Also the metropolis is the second in Poland in terms of the centers number. These are the most important findings of the „10 years of the business services sector in Poland” publication prepared by the Polish Information and Foreign Investment Agency (PAIiIZ) and Hays Poland and presented in Katowice on Wednesday.
The aim of this report is to sum up ten years of the business services sector (BSS) in Poland and includes business process outsourcing, IT, research and development as well as shared service centers. The database comprises centers located in 23 Polish cities. 11 locations host more than 10 centers: Kraków, Warsaw, Wrocław, Łódź, Silesian Metropolis (Katowice and Gliwice, among others), Tri-City (Gdańsk, Gdynia and Sopot), Poznań, Bydgoszcz, Lublin, Rzeszów and Szczecin. These cities represent the main locations for BSS activities. The centers operating in those cities employ almost 98% of all employees of the sector. Over 150 000 people are employed in the centers in Poland at present. 10% of them are hired in the Katowice agglomeration.
In terms of the number of centers, Warsaw leads pack, with 133 companies, followed by Katowice and other cities of the agglomeration (83 centers), with Kraków taking the third position (78 centers).
In terms of the number of employees in a single center, Kraków dominates whereas Katowice – the second city considering the total number of centers – takes the fifth position. The average size of a center in Kraków is 384 people and in Katowice 180 people, which means that the latter it is characterized by numerous yet smaller centers (average for Poland: 228 employees).
What might seems surprising, the BSS centers in the Katowice agglomeration are dominated by companies with Polish background (36 centers), followed by investors from the United States (15), Great Britain (8), the Netherlands (6) and Germany (5), among others.
In relations to the type of centers, the highest share is represented by IT centers (38%). Also, 47% of BSS companies in the agglomeration created IT departments within its organization structures. „We can now say that Katowice has found its niche in the business services sector and this is the IT specialization. Investors already perceived the fact as a positive effect and we can see the city’s market share in the sector is growing faster than the Poland’s average” – said Marcin Nowak, managing director of Infrastructure Services Eastern Europe at Capgemini Poland.
„We noticed that other main locations for BSS companies in Poland, for example Kraków and Wrocław, are over saturated, if we think about the number of investors. That is why Katowice will be more and more often recommended as a preferred location for foreign companies by our agency” – added Rafał Szajewski from the Foreign Investment Department at PAIiIZ.
