Chapter 5
Goods exports have grown sixfold since EU accession. Poland leads a dozen niches — from dishwashers to windows, poultry and apple concentrate — and its fastest-growing export is intangible: IT services and games.
Poland's economy is export-led and industrial: more than a third of foreign sales are machinery and transport equipment, and one in four exported goods goes to Germany. But alongside that sits a surprisingly long list of categories in which Poland is number one in Europe or the world — and a growing export of skills: IT services, whose foreign sales grew tenfold in fourteen years. The dark side here is single and concrete: R&D spending still a third below the EU average.
Fig. 5.1
Goods exports from Poland, USD bn, current prices, 2004–2025
Fig. 5.2
Poland's share of EU production or of world exports in selected categories, %, 2024
A textbook example of Poland's role in the European value chain: a very high share of production with low brand recognition. Nearly six in ten dishwashers and washing machines in the Union are assembled in Polish plants of BSH, Electrolux, Beko or Samsung; one in five European chickens and one in five windows in the world come from Poland.
The list is longer than the chart: third furniture exporter in Europe, the world's second producer of small motor yachts, fifth cosmetics exporter in the EU, 58% of the European hydrogen-bus market (Solaris). The niches are real but also fragile — lithium-ion battery exports, the hit of 2023 (EUR 10.9 bn, 2nd in the world), lost more than half their value in 2024 as demand for electric cars in Germany fell.
Fig. 5.3
Exports of ICT services (telecoms, computer and information services), balance of payments, USD bn, 2010–2024
The smoothest growth curve in the whole material: fifteen years without a single decline, including pandemic 2020. IT-services exports are the part of the Polish economy that depends neither on the German business cycle nor on energy prices — it sells skills, not production capacity.
Set against the battery-export curve (peak and collapse within two years) it shows the difference between two strategies: a foreign corporation's factory can vanish from the trade balance in one season; a hundred thousand programmers cannot.
Fig. 5.4
Number of BLIK transactions, millions, 2020–2025
A six-year exponential series and one of the strongest arguments for Poland's digital maturity. BLIK — a mobile payment system with a six-digit code, built by a consortium of banks — now handles more e-commerce operations than cards, and phone-number transfers have replaced cash in everyday settlements between people.
The darker side of digital Poland lies elsewhere: only 50.4% of Poles aged 16–74 have at least basic digital skills, against 60.4% in the EU. Excellent infrastructure does not automatically translate into citizens' competences.
Fig. 5.5
Cumulative sales of CD PROJEKT games, million copies, as of end-2025
Video games are today Poland's most recognisable cultural export — The Witcher is a literary, gaming and TV brand, and Cyberpunk 2077, after its disastrous 2020 launch, reached 35 million copies faster than The Witcher 3. Poland's games industry is the second or third largest in Europe by employment (after the UK, level with France).
Honestly: after the pandemic peak the sector shrank three years in a row, and one in four studios from the 2023 report disappeared within two years. CD PROJEKT, for its part, had the second-best year in its history in 2025 by profit (PLN 595 m) and is investing in The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2.
Fig. 5.6
Gross domestic expenditure on R&D (GERD), % of GDP, Poland vs EU27, 2014–2024
The central chart of this chapter's dark side. For a decade Poland closed the gap faster than most of the Union (+0.46 pp, the fourth-largest increase in the EU), but in 2024 spending fell — in nominal terms too — setting the country back two years. The gap to the EU average is now 0.8 pp, and to the EU target more than half.
In innovation rankings Poland has stood still for six years (38th–41st in the Global Innovation Index), although it gets better outputs than its inputs would suggest. The weakest links are not firms but institutions and financing: patents, venture capital, publications among the most-cited.
Fig. 5.7
Digital infrastructure versus citizens' competences
Five tiles are about infrastructure, the sixth about people. Poland has one of the densest cashless-payment systems in the world, a digital identity on the phone with the force of a document, and growing skills exports; at the same time half of adults lack basic digital skills, and the gap to the EU average (10 pp) is not shrinking despite rapid improvement.
Two decades of almost uninterrupted growth with one deep slump in 2009 and a flat 2024. The value of foreign sales grew sixfold and Poland's share of world exports from 0.57% to 1.52%, moving it from 32nd to 22nd among exporters.
The structure is stable and is both an asset and a risk: more than a third is machinery and transport equipment, and a quarter of the total goes to one country. Weakness in German industry feeds straight through to Polish suppliers — hence the falling share of exports in GDP since 2022 (from 62% to 50%).