Olivia Centre in Gdansk is set to go for a record in terms of signed lease contracts this year. In the first six months of 2022, lease agreements covered an area of over 22,000 sqm, which, in the light of nearly 40,000 sqm leased in the entire 2021, allows the project owners to forecast another good result in the whole of 2022. As a reminder, all Olivia is 175,000 sqm GLA – and is the largest office project in Poland.
In line with Olivia’s policy, the concluded contracts cover companies from very diverse sectors of the economy. This allows to ensure a wide tenant mix, and thus a field for cooperation between the tenants who chose this office area. New residents include finance, IT, consulting, transport, HR, and even agriculture.
“The first half of the year allows us to be optimistic about the entire year 2022,” says Maciej Kotarski, commercialization director at Olivia Centre. “The Tri-City has recently been on everyone’s lips, and our partners in conversations often emphasize that their employees very often think about moving to the Tri-City. The most frequently mentioned advantages are access to the sea and the beach, high-quality air, the extensive Tri-City Landscape Park and extensive infrastructure, which makes it easy to live in the Tri-City: the moraine hills surrounding the agglomeration allow you to develop sports passions. The sea is a great stimulus for practising all kinds of water sports, and the extensive network of bicycle paths allows you to choose an ecological way of commuting to work. We also draw from all of this and run passion development clubs, perfectly integrating the Olivia community.”
The new tenants of office space include the largest and most innovative companies in the world, as well as start-ups that have developed over the years to the position of leaders in their segments. The new resident of Olivia is Capgemini – a global leader in consulting in the field of transformation and business management with a group budget of €18 billion. Ultimately, up to 1,000 employees in its offices will provide services in the field of operational tasks and systems for data aggregation and analysis.
The new tenant of space is also one of the most innovative companies in the world – British Graphcore, which develops computing systems for artificial intelligence. The company designed a processor called IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit), the architecture of which allows researchers to apply new methods and algorithms in the field of machine learning. Graphcore’s R&D centre works directly with R&D institutions, universities and companies around the world.
In the first half of the year, the first technology centre in Poland and the third in Europe were opened by the clothing giant Nike, which in Olivia will carry out projects in the areas related to data streaming, data processing and analysis, as well as technological innovations that in the future will be implemented by the American company in stores around the world.
Olivia is conducive to the development of many companies in the IT sector, which makes it a true hub of this industry. Earlier this year, companies such as Softserve, Acaisoft, Sentillia B.V. opened their offices in Olivia. The first is one of the most dynamically developing companies in the industry with headquarters in Austin, Texas, and Lviv, Ukraine. They have been operating in the Polish market since 2014, currently employing about 1,000 people, and their development is associated with new contracts, including from the FinTech industry operating in Southeast Asia. Acaisoft has been on the market since 2015 and has offices in two locations in Poland and California in the United States. He specializes in programming cloud solutions. Sentillia B.V. is a company specializing in unique programming solutions for financial markets and blockchain technology.
In Olivia’s newest building, at Olivia Prime, the office with a spectacular roof terrace will be taken over by Just Join IT, the fastest-growing recruitment platform in the IT industry. It is visited by over 0.5 million Polish programmers every month. The same group also includes the RocketJobs.pl and HelloHR.pl portals, focusing their recruitment activities on marketing, sales, finance, engineering, HR, BI & Data and many other industries.
New tenants are also companies from the food industry: Polish Agro (a member of an international group of 80 companies, operating in 80 countries with a turnover of over €4.4 billion) and the company MIK Food, specializing in the export, trade and import of fish and seafood from such countries as Iceland, Norway, the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Indonesia, Vietnam and Chile.
Notably, among the signed contracts, more than half were extensions of contracts or the selection of new space by the current residents of Olivia. This confirms the high attractiveness of this office centre in the Northern Polish market. O4 Coworking, operating in Olivia, also breaks records of popularity. The shared space reservation rate is 100 percent in each of the 4 buildings in which O4 has its offices. Only in the first half of this year, did 32 companies join O4. Traditionally, most of them represent new technologies and software, but new Residents also include businesses related to interior finishing, rental of clothing and hygiene equipment, or energy production.
“We are pleased with the number of new O4 residents, and the fact – it might be even more important – that the existing customers not only stay with us but often grow and develop,” says Marta Moksa, director of O4 Coworking. “Thanks to the strong synergy with Olivia Centre, we can always find a much larger space for them – if they are ready for it. We also derive great satisfaction from the results of recent surveys carried out among our residents, which clearly show that being in O4 is much more than an office. They are primarily people who make any job more bearable.”
