A WEE DRAM
CHRIS GILMOUR: Poland’s love affair with shopping gives EPP a boost
Echo Polska Properties is Poland's largest retail landlord with 19 assets and two development projects
Echo Polska Properties (EPP) enjoys a heady mix of good fortune. It is the largest retail landlord in Poland, the central European economy that has Europe's highest economic growth rate. The Poles have a love affair with shopping, an obsession in response to the restrictive days of communism, when they were told what they could buy, how much and when. In those bleak times, Poles could buy only from state-owned supermarkets with a meagre offering of poor-quality products, and even these were in short supply. Little wonder, then, that Polish consumers have been lapping up the large variety of goods that would not be out of place in most Western supermarkets. EPP board director Marek Belka, an economist and former Polish prime minister, in reviewing the final results to December 2018, comments that “Poland is an outlier in Europe. It has the highest growth in the EU, can deal with external shocks, and has not suffered a recession since being admitted in May 2004.” The internal structur...
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