Have you heard of this company? Baltic TOP30 was won by Thermo Fisher Scientific Baltics from Lithuania valued at 6 billion euros
Illar Kaasik
Managing Partner at Prudentia Tallinn
In addition to various rankings of Estonia's most valuable and largest companies, we should also talk about Baltic TOP30 ranking. The winner of 2022 ranking was Thermo Fisher Scientific Baltics, a little-known Lithuanian company valued at 6 billion euros.
The Lithuanian company’s owner, Thermo Fisher Scientific is a world leader in serving science and helps its customers in the B2B sector to develop cancer medicines, protect the environment and ensure food safety. The company's brands include, for instance, Thermo Scientific, Applied Biosystems, Invitrogen, Fisher Scientific, Unity Lab Services, Patheon and PPD. The total revenue of the US-based Thermo Fisher Scientific is more than $40 billion. In 2021 its Lithuanian arm was ranked second in the Baltic TOP with a value of 4.7 billion. In 2022 its value grew to 6 billion mainly thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 2022 Baltic TOP 30 compiled by Prudentia together with its Lithuanian cooperation partner Confidentus included ten companies from Lithuania, ten from Estonia and three from Latvia. The remaining seven companies in the Baltic TOP 30 are subsidiaries of multinational companies that operate separately in more than one Baltic country. This seems to indicate that Lithuanian and Estonian companies are more consolidated in their respective sectors, while Lithuanian and Estonian companies are also more active in Baltic and other European markets.
Estonia's best performers in the Baltic TOP30 are Luminor and Graanul Invest
From Estonia, the two highest-ranked companies in TOP 30 were Luminor Bank and Graanul Invest, placing 12th and 13th overall, respectively. It should be noted that Luminor is consolidating its Baltic business in Estonia, while Swedbank is doing so in Latvia. As a side note, Swedbank AS won the Estonian TOP101 ranking in 2022.
In addition, a special mention should be made about two Estonian companies - Eesti Energia that came 16th and Enefit Green which placed 17th overall. Although these companies are part of the same group, in the 2022 TOP101 ranking of Estonia's most valuable companies, it was decided to rank them as separate companies since the rules of compiling TOP101 dictate that the values of listed companies must be shown separately. Without this rule, Eesti Energia would have been valued at ca 2.2 billion and ranked sixth overall in the Baltic TOP 30. In my opinion, the decision to include these two companies separately in the ranking was accurate, because the further development of two well-managed companies, Eesti Energia and Enefit Green, is important from the point of view of both Estonia and the Baltic energy sector as a whole. It is most likely that once Enefit Green completes its offshore wind farm in the Gulf of Riga with a total capacity of up to 1,000 MW that would cover almost half of Estonia's and Latvia's electricity needs, it would be ranked the highest among the most valuable companies in Estonia. The main business of Eesti Energia is to develop oil shale energy and oil shale chemistry. Oil shale, which contains 70% organic matter, has enormous potential in the chemical industry. In the near future, when sufficient renewable energy production resources have been developed, it may be possible to abandon the burning of oil shale at Narva power plants. It should also not be forgotten that Eesti Energia has the competitive advantage of having both technological and labor resources for potential exploitation of phosphorite and graptolite.
Maxima's parent company Vilniaus Prekyba remains on top
With the EBITDA of nearly half a billion and a value of 4.7 billion euros, Vilniaus Prekyba, a Lithuanian retail conglomerate that owns Maxima, Acropolis, Euroaphoteca, Stokrotka, Barbora brands and operates in six countries with more than 2,000 outlets and 44,000 employees, was one of the most successful companies in the Baltics in 2022, placing 2nd overall. As part of the group's continued international growth, in 2022 the company merged its pharmacy chain Euroapotheca and Oriola in Sweden, creating a company with the largest number of pharmacies in Sweden with more than 500 outlets.
All in all, the total value of the 30 most valuable companies in the Baltics increased by 3.5% in a year, i.e. by 1.6 billion euros, reaching 46.6 billion euros, and in terms of their number, Estonian companies are well represented in Baltic TOP30.
