Lease is a modern way of financing businesses, local governments, public utility companies and consumers: everything one can buy can be taken on lease. In Poland, lease arrangement did not appear before 1991. In the initial period, the leasing market was considerably fragmented and dominated by small private businesses, most of them having limited financial resources. Until 2001 the civil code provided no definition of leasing. Provisions related to lease agreements could only be found in tax laws. From a taxation perspective, some 90% of transactions on our market was, and still is, accounted for in a similar way as rent agreements, in which the whole lease rent  is treated as revenue expenditure. From the economic point of view, these transactions were not operating leases but finance leases, that is arrangements in which the responsibility for selecting the supplier and the goods to be leased, and consequently the risk connected with the repayment of the whole amount due for the acquired goods, should rest with the user. However, this issue was not regulated by law, which meant chances for the recovery of overdue payments under a lease agreement were considerably limited. Obviously, this situation had an adverse affect on the condition of many leasing businesses, something – which combined with their limited access to capital – eventually resulted in a major change in the structure of the Polish leasing market. At the same time, work was underway to regulate issues related to leasing in Polish legislation. The Association was actively involved in the process. A definition of leasing appeared in the civil code in 2001. The definition states that the financing party takes on an obligation to buy from the supplier indicated by the user goods to be used, or to be used and to generate proceeds, and then transfer the goods to the user; the user takes on an obligation to pay to the financing party a sum at least equal to the price they paid to buy the goods. There are now around 40 leasing companies operating on the Polish market. An overwhelming majority of them are members of large banking groups or manufacturers.
Last year the value of the leasing industry’s new portfolio reached a record figure of PLN21.5 billion, which represented an increase of 33% compared to the previous year and meant that every third investment on the real estate market in Poland was financed through a lease arrangement. Statistics for successive months this year show that the sector’s 2007 results will be even better. In the first half of the year the value of newly signed lease agreements rose by 60% and we estimate that the total value of movable and real assets financed in 2007 through lease arrangements will exceed PLN32 billion.
Most transactions on the Polish leasing market are deals involving movable assets. More than 60% of them involve the lease of vehicles and around 30% the lease of industrial machines and equipment. Tractor units, semi-trailers and trailers account for 40% of the leased vehicles, while passenger cars account for 36%. The segment of industrial machines and equipment is dominated by construction and road-building machines and equipment (33%).
On the real estate leasing market (about 10% of the whole leasing market), office and shopping space enjoys the greatest popularity: respectively 43% and 40%.

The following investment purchases were financed through lease arrangement in the three quarters to September (percent change from the same period of the previous year provided in brackets):
– means of road transport worth around PLN14 billion (up by 67%),
– of which passenger cars worth around PLN5.2 billion (up by 69%),
– industrial machines and equipment worth around PLN6.7 billion (up by 50%),
– computers and office equipment worth around PLN384.6 million (up by 40%),
– means of rail, air and water transport worth around PLN249.4 million (down by 52%),
– other fixed assets worth around PLN222.9 million (up by 124%).