Irish firms hoping to move into EU accession states will find plenty of help at hand, writes Derek Scally.

Attention Irish business: this is your last call to board the Central European Express. EU accession will provide a one-off opportunity for Irish companies to establish a foothold in a new 75 million consumer market of central Europe.

Anyone who has shied away from the challenge until now will soon find no shortage of local support from Enterprise Ireland, as well as countless Irish businesses that have already gone the same road.

"In six or seven years' time, people will be thinking: 'Why didn't I do that then?'," says Mr Enda O'Coineen, an Irish entrepreneur based in Prague.

"In France, Germany and Spain the entry costs are so high and there is less openness to do things. Here you had 50 years of communism and they know they have to open up to new things. But the door will close in five years."

That is definitely the case in the Czech Republic, where dozens of Irish companies have profited from strong economic growth and the Czech tradition of industrial production and engineering. Some Irish firms have partly shifted manufacturing to take advantage of labour costs, which are one-fifth of those in Ireland, but also for the flexibility of being able to get the product to clients on the continent at short notice and without long shipping times.

The simplistic way of looking at it is that Irish companies are exporting jobs, but that's not the way it is. By opening up here, companies are helping the competitiveness of the company in Ireland, according to Mr Jim Mongey of Enterprise Ireland in Prague.

Local foreign investment agency Czech Invest has attracted investment worth €6 billion annually in recent years thanks to a successful local adaptation of the IDA Ireland formula.

It has begun a strategy to attract pharmaceutical and biotechnology investment, but its greatest successes in the past decade were in attracting industrial investment. The new PSA Peugeot Citroen Plant in Kolin, an hour's drive from Prague, will create huge opportunities for supply manufacturers. The car companies have promised to invest $1.4 billion (€1.13 billion) and create 3,000 jobs with an extra 10,000 jobs created indirectly.

Irish SMEs anxious to get a piece of the action without making a huge investment would do well to talk to Ward Manufacturing. Brothers Mike and Maurice run logistics and contract manufacturing companies based in the city of Most, located halfway between Prague and Dresden.

Another local Irish partner is Source Network, which offers a consultancy service for cautious investors.

"We look for locations, buildings or land, we will project manage the move of your assets and get visas," says Mr Eugene Sweeney from Strabane. "We minimise the fear and risk by ensuring the total cost of the relocation is minimised by working with Czech service companies."

Finding competent local staff in central Europe should be no problem, thanks to Irish recruitment agency Grafton Recruitment, which operates in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

The Polish market, with nearly 40 million consumers, presents the greatest singular investment opportunity among the accession states.

Irish companies have invested nearly €1 billion in Polish companies in the past few years, employ more than 12,000 people and have an annual turnover of €850 million.

The accession process will make it easier for firms to do business here, says Mr Declan Ryan of Enterprise Ireland in Warsaw.

He expects accession to reduce the challenges for SMEs to crack the market, in particular, with simplified bureaucracy and reduced customs delays. Irish companies such as AIB and CRH have been hugely successful, not least because of the ease of working with Polish colleagues.

It's a good cultural fit. The Poles see a country with a similar history, so there's a lot of goodwill, says Mr Eamonn Crowley, senior manager of AIB Poland.

As well as accession, the allure of the Polish market will increase next year thanks to a reduction of corporate tax to 19 per cent from 27 per cent and the addition of a direct Dublin-Warsaw flight.

The Polish economy is still a cause for concern, however, as a result of government failure to push through fiscal reform. A huge projected deficit next year could dampen its EU debut. Nevertheless, Poland is convinced it has the edge on its accession neighbours.

"Poland can win the race for investors in Europe. I'm absolutely convinced that, in central and eastern Europe, there is potential for at least one 'tiger' country - a country capable of receiving the best investments like Ireland has done in western Europe," said Mr Witold Orlowski, an economic adviser to President Aleksander Kwasniewski, in the Warsaw Voice newspaper.

Hungary is another pretender to the tiger throne, a decade after opening to global markets. The country's politicians are proud to point out that nearly 400 of the Fortune 500 companies have a presence there, while the economy has enjoyed six consecutive years of sustained GDP growth, averaging 4.5 per cent annually.

Hungary is a much more global economy in that sense than any other in this region, said Mr Istvan Csillag, the Minister for Economy and Transport, speaking to The Irish Times.

Five Irish companies open in Budapest each year, according to the local Enterprise Ireland office, joining existing companies such as AIB and Grafton Recruitment.

Hungary offers huge opportunities in the electronics sector thanks to its supply of graduates, its central location and relatively straightforward business environment.

The Hungarian Investment and Trade Development Agency is hopeful that the new Smart Hungary investment programme in electronics, IT and R&D, not to mention slashing corporate tax to 12 per cent, will help the country make up foreign direct investment ground lost to its neighbours in recent years.

Slovakia hopes accession will give it a chance to come out from the shadow of the Czech Republic. It shares that country's strong tradition in engineering and automotive manufacture as well as IT and software development. Volkswagen and Matsushita both operate three plants in Slovakia, as do the the software and shared-service operations of multinationals such as Siemens, Alcatel and IBM.

Slovakia has more than 5,000 people working in domestic and multinational software development, with a world-class telecommunications network and a huge pool of highly skilled software engineers. Wage costs are just 15 per cent that in Ireland and half that in the Czech Republic, Hungary or Poland.

Further north in the Baltics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are competing furiously to attract foreign investment.

Estonia has the edge, thanks to the port of Tallinn. The port is the biggest in the Baltics, twice the size of Liverpool, and handles nearly 40 million tonnes of cargo and six million passengers a year.

We are at the centre of everything, situated on the corner between Sweden, Finland and St Petersburg, says Mr Erik Sakkov, the port's vice-president of marketing.

But the first port of call for any Irish business should be Enterprise Ireland. It has produced an impressive brochure, Building Your Business in Central Europe and Russia, to assist companies contemplating the central European plunge.