TOP ESTONIAN ENTERPRISES

ABB AS
Foreign Investor
2009
Bo Henriksson:
“Estonia is still
an attractive
economic
environment”
Bo Henriksson, the managing director
of ABB Baltikum, believes that in spite
of everything Estonia is continuously
an attractive economic environment.
Though, even more should be contributed
to the innovation and education
and the relations with Russia
should be improved.
ABB takes the titles of the competition
of Entrepreneurship Award every year.
What do these titles tell you?
The company’s owners and managers continuously
believe in investing to Estonia and we have
good employees – nice skilled workers, capable
specialists, engineers and capable managers
who create sufficient added value. ABB has invested
to Estonia more than a billion kroons
within 17 years, the major part of it within the
last seven years. We produce in four plants in
Estonia which employs the total of thousand
people.
In annual FT Global 500 ranking list of the business
newspaper Financial Times which lists the
companies according to the market value, ABB
group is located on the 123rd place with the
market value of 32 billion dollars and leads in
the sector of industrial technology. No one
among 122 companies in the table above have
comparable production or development activities
at the Estonian market.
How have the economic crisis and
the abrupt amendments of law in Toompea
influenced the activities of ABB?
We are mostly influenced by the processes at
the world market –approximately 70 percent of
the sales is related to export. The investments
of our private clients are to a large extent dependent
on the balance of the money market.
Some of them have postponed their investments.
The situation is much more stable in the
business sector related to the establishing of
the transfer and distribution network. This year
we somewhat decreased the production. The
record result of 2008 (the sale of 2.6 billion
kroons) will not be repeated this year or also
next year. But since 2010 the situation should
become stable. This year our investments
would obviously remain smaller than last year
which reached 260 million kroons. I do not believe
that the processes in Toompea could damage
the economic environment so that this
would have an impact on our activities. Only political
earthquake, replacement of democracy
with totalitarism would make ABB to terminate
the activities of its plants here. The situation
where the state would decide to nationalise
ABB. But maybe not, as the group functions
successfully in the conditions of different
regimes and economic models.
If you could be the Estonian prime
minister now, which five decisions
were the first to be made by you ?
In order to change the economic environment
I would warm up the relations with Russia. This
would provide many new opportunities. I would
also review the current policy of education, by
contributing more to the engineer-technical
specialties. I would support more innovation
and export, by offering export benefits. Export
is one of the main economic engines of Estonia.
Also, I would search more compromises which
would create higher political stability.
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