'21 | Latvian Business Guide
Key Advantages • Historic transport and trade gateway • Access to Russian and European markets • Excellent infrastructure • Diversified alternatives; no bias towards road transport • Three ice-free ports • Development of air transport sector • Riga International Airport is a regional hub serving more than 40% of all Baltic airline passengers • Competitive and multilingual labour force
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (INCLUDING GLOBAL BUSINESS SERVICES) Summary Latvia’s IT sector provides substantial competitive advantages to investors, mainly through the availability of highly skilled IT professionals, language skills, and a combination of Western-style working culture with proximity to and knowledge of the Russian market. A highly developed communications and logistics infrastructure and very high labour productivity. Global Business Services are also rapidly developing in Latvia. It is becoming very popular for companies from Scandinavian countries to choose Latvia as a place to locate their business service centres because of language knowledge, cultural compatibility, accessibility and cost-effectiveness. In addition, a number of internationally known chemical producers have chosen Riga as their destination for shared service centres (SSC). Key Advantages • A skilled, multilingual labour force and high investment in tangible assets contribute to productivity • Well-developed export market • Knowledge of foreign languages among IT professionals • Superb efficiency of IT infrastructure • Ease of access from any European country • Western-style working culture • Labour cost-effectiveness • Broadband – low cost, high performance
SMART CITY Smart Cities aren’t just a concept or dream of the future. Many of them are already active and expanding rapidly. For us, it is the capital of Latvia – Riga with the highest population, the density of technology companies and higher education institutions where smart city solutions can be tested. But also other Latvian cities and towns are starting to successfully implement various Smart city solutions, for example, Sigulda, Valmiera, Jurmala, Jelgava, to name a few. Since 2018, Latvia has begun to develop its Smart City strategy, building an ecosystem between the industry, the government, municipalities and academia. Smart City ecosystem is a framework predominantly composed of ICT and Smart energy to develop, deploy and promote sustainable development practices to address growing urbanization challenges. The main domains covered are digital and physical infrastructure, legal framework (incl. pilot territories for different solution testing), human capital/talent, funding and research and development.
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