Finland-Lithuania Business Association Newsletter, June 2022

"Terve / Labas,

Positivity is contagious! Despite all odds of these times, let us be positive. Finland is an Olympic and World double champion in ice hockey this spring! Go Leijonat! Go Finland! And the IIHF Championship was won on the home court in Tampere. SULI has several new members and a new Board elected at the Annual Meeting held at the Nordic Investment Bank headquarters in Helsinki.

Hockey has been the main focus in the last two weeks. Financially, the event in Tampere (half of the qualification games were played in Helsinki though) was a huge success for IIHF, the Finnish organizers and  the city of Tampere and its business. Besides demonstrating that hard work, resilience, and teamwork counts, it shows that people from different countries can be happy together in the audience even if they appear to be competitors in the arena. Sport unites people even if at the end, the winner takes it all and the loser gets silver.

In business, we can take a note of sport – or to take it to the next level – war. All levels are in front of our eyes right now in Europe. In the previous Newsletter in the beginning of March, I wrote mainly about the war in Ukraine simply because I was shocked, like everybody else. Now we know that hard work, resilience, and teamwork count – also in Ukraine. Newscasts bring horrors of war to our homes but at the same time we see that Ukrainians are true fighters and not giving up. 

We are clearly on the way to a New World Order. The war will end one day like all wars always do, but the world will not be the same. Business and people are already adapting to the new situation. It is not a process without blood, sweat and tears, unfortunately for many, and not only Ukrainians.  

“When the going gets tough, the tough get going” – the nations, companies and people who realize this, will evolve, and succeed. Without success, companies, economies, and nations will fail. Russia is on this path to a failed state by its own choice. 

Good values are holding up, and again - hard work, resilience, and teamwork count. For example, Lithuanians collected more than 5 MEUR by crowd funding in only three days – to buy a Bayraktar, a remote controlled, unmanned combat plane for the Ukrainian armed forces. Wow!

Finland and Sweden will join NATO only because of Russia. Our neighbour has changed inevitably. After the Crimean and Donbass takeovers, we did not see further to our noses. It was considered as minor interference in the relationship with Russia because we were all naïve – and also because Europeans were leaning on the Russian energy supplies and business was good. This will change now, no longer business or energy. It is The New World Order.

Headlines will focus on food, energy, and inflation in the next months. We may see turmoil in different parts of Europe and near-by.  Hard work, resilience and teamwork count, not forgetting the ones who need help on the rocky road. Let us remain positive, it is contagious.

Risto Uusitalo
Chairman, Finland-Lithuania Business Association

Read the Newsletter here.