Kraków-based Polish business IT provider Comarch has announced that it will launch subsidiaries in China and Vietnam by the end of June. “If we want to seriously cooperate with global partners that operate in the Far East, we cannot handle them from Poland,” Janusz Filipiak, president of Comarch, told Rzeczpospolita. The newspaper reported that the company’s Asian venture would cost around zł.3 million, while at the end of 2008 Comarch boasted zł.200 million in cash reserves.

Marzena Kowalska, who is responsible for developing the firm’s Far East branches, said that the operations would mainly sell Comarch’s ECOD electronic document flow systems to retail sector businesses entering these markets. Comarch will be the first Polish IT company to directly enter the Far East markets, although Young Digital Planet (YDP), a producer of e-learning software, already operates through a partner in Malaysia.

According to a report by Computerworld Polska, Comarch was the largest exporter among Polish IT companies in 2007, with zł.105 million worth of products and services sold, and it should hold this position for 2008.

“The example of [YPP] conquering Asian markets confirms that this is doable and that Polish companies can effectively compete with Western ones,” commented Bartłomiej Witucki, spokesperson for the Business Software Alliance. “The expansion of Polish IT companies proves that Poland is on the right path to a knowledge-based economy and is not just a cheap workforce.”