The Polish miracle: How IR is finally catching up in the ‘second Japan’ predicted to outstrip the UK’s GDP

A new wave of Polish tech firms are bringing IR into the spotlight – shown by record attendance at the Polish IR Association conference at the end of 2025

Something is changing on the Polish IR scene. While the country’s economy has been booming – and booming – it is only in the past year that investor relations has begun to get its dues.

That’s according to Adam Kalkusinski, CEO, head of IR at ccgroup, speaking to IR Impact on the tails of the Polish IR Society conference late last year, where he talked about the trends that would be shaping the Polish capital markets this year. The event was the biggest coming together of the Polish IR community to date, according to Michael Chojnacki, managing director of closir and one of the founders of the society.

A recent article in The Times discussed the county’s ‘economic miracle.’ Its authors explained how, in 1980, ‘the upstart electrician’ Lech Wałęsa – founder of Solidarnosc, the first populist movement to bring down a communist regime in the eastern bloc – said he would transform Poland’s into ‘a second Japan’. As far from a possibility as that might have seemed at the time, last year Poland did in fact pass Japan in terms of GDP per capita, when adjusted for purchasing power parity. This year it is projected to overtake Israel ‘with Spain and New Zealand in its sights’. The country’s GDP per capita set to overtake Britain’s ‘in the next decade or so,’ according to the article.