The Baltic Cup is an international football competition contested by the national teams of the Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Sometimes guests from the Northern Europe subregion are also invited: Finland has participated in the event twice, Iceland once, and Faroe Islands made a debut appearance in 2024. Though originally held annually, the competition has been biennial since 2008.
MicroLink was a Baltic IT company, founded by Rainer Nõlvak and Hanno Haamer in August 1991 in Tallinn, Estonia. Launched as a PC maker, it diversified into IT distribution, systems integration and providing of internet services and electronics manufacturing. The company established itself as the largest Baltic PC maker by the mid-1990s.
Posti Group Oyj, trading internationally as Posti Group Corporation, is the main Finnish postal service delivering mail and parcels in Finland. The State of Finland is the sole shareholder of the company. Posti has a universal service obligation that entails weekday deliveries of letters in all of Finland's municipalities. Posti's head office is located in Pohjois-Pasila in Helsinki. Posti's history spans nearly 400 years.
LETA is the main Latvian news agency. Its headquarters are in Riga. It is owned by Estonian entrepreneur Margus Linnamäe through his company Postimees Group.
Allan Martinson is an Estonian technology entrepreneur and investor. He is the CEO of Xolo, a company serving the global freelancer community. In the past, he was the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Sales Officer of Starship Technologies, a company building robotic platforms for last-mile delivery until March 2018, and managing partner of MTVP, a tech investment company.
Eesti Gaas AS, branded internationally as Elenger, is an energy company with headquarters in Tallinn, Estonia. The company's main activity is selling and distributing of natural gas in Estonian, Latvian, Finnish, and Lithuanian markets. Eesti Gaas product portfolio includes also LNG, CNG, and electricity, including solar energy.
Eesti Energia AS is a public limited energy company in Estonia with its headquarters in Tallinn. It is the world's biggest oil shale to energy company. The company was founded in 1939. As of 2014, it operates in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Jordan and Utah, United States. In Estonia, the company operates under the name Eesti Energia, while using the brand name Enefit for international operations. The main raw material for energy production – oil shale – is extracted from mines located in Eastern-Estonia and owned by the company. The group of Eesti Energia has three main operation areas: electricity generation, shale oil production, and sale and distribution of electricity. Its shares are owned by the Government of Estonia.
Latvian Independent Television was a major private television company in Latvia, founded in 1996. LNT featured TV series, news and entertainment programmes, airing 24 hours a day in Latvian. It went off the air on March 1, 2020, and was replaced by TV3 Life.
Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš is a Latvian American politician who served as the prime minister of Latvia from 2019 until 2023. A linguist and businessman by profession, he previously served as Latvia's minister of Economics and a Member of the European Parliament. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, United States, to parents who had left Latvia during the Soviet occupation, he was active in the American Latvian community throughout his youth.
AS Pasažieru vilciens, operating as Vivi, is the sole passenger railway operator in Latvia, operating both electric and diesel trains on various lines throughout the country. Officially AS "Pasažieru vilciens" the company was founded in November 2001. It is fully owned by the Latvian state, with the Ministry of Transport acting as shareholder.
Rail transport in Latvia is done on 1,520 mm Russian gauge. The main railway company is the state-owned Latvijas dzelzceļš (LDz), with its subsidiary Pasažieru vilciens (PV) providing passenger services.
Since 1991 Estonia has changed from being a former Soviet republic to a member of the European Union and the European Monetary Union, making a rapid transformation in several fields, including the mass media, which is a vibrant and competitive sector. For many years Estonia has been among the top ten in Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) Press Freedom Index. In 2017 it was ranked 12th out of 180 countries by RSF while Freedom House assigned Estonia’s press freedom a score of 16/100. A cross-media landscape that embraces traditional media as well as the Internet and digital media characterises the contemporary media system in Estonia.
Latvia is one of the three post-Soviet Baltic states having regained independence in 1991 and since 2004 is a member State of the European Union. After its independence there have been fundamental changes of political, economic and social nature that have turned Latvia into a democratic country with a free market economy. This reflects on the mass media landscape which is considered well-developed despite being subjected to a limited market and a linguistic and cultural split between Latvian (58.2%) and Russian speakers (37.5%). In 2017 Freedom House defined Latvia's press freedom status as “free", assigning to the country's press freedom a score of 26/100. The 2017 World Press Freedom Index prepared annually by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) states that media in Latvia have a "two-speed freedom", underlying different levels of freedom for Latvian-language and Russian-language media. According to RSF's Index the country is ranked 28th among 180 countries.
Before the independence from the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1990, Lithuanian print media sector served mainly as a propaganda instrument of the Communist Party of Lithuania (LKP). Alternative and uncontrolled press began to appear in the country starting from 1988, when the Initiative Group of the Reform Movement of Lithuania Sąjūdis was established. After the declaration of independence the government stopped interfering in the media outlets which for the most part were first privatised to their journalists and employees and later to local businessman and companies. Currently media ownership in Lithuania is concentrated among a small number of domestic and foreign companies.
Draugiem is a social networking website launched in 2004. It is one of the largest social networking website in Latvia with approximately 2.6 million registered users.
AS Citadele banka is a Latvian bank and financial and asset manager. The principal market of operation for the Citadele Group is the Baltic States.
AS Postimees Grupp, formerly known as AS Postimees and AS Eesti Meedia, is an Estonian media holding company headquartered in Tallinn. The company is currently owned by MM Group, having acquired the half of the company from Norwegian company Schibsted in 2013 and bought the remaining half in 2015. The group is one of the largest media group in the Baltics. Among the Group's activities are creation of print and online media, production of television and radio, e-commerce.
Crime in Latvia is relatively low, by global standards, especially compared to previous years, when it was named the "crime capital of Europe" by Forbes in 2008. The homicide rate in Latvia was 4.9 per 100,000 people in 2020, a sharp drop from 10 cases per 100,000 people in 2000, and has been steadily decreasing. Although Latvia'a homicide rate is high by European Union standards, it is below the world average of 6.2 per 100.000. The United States Department of State has assessed Latvia's security rating as "medium", with a moderate crime rate. In recent times, crime has been increasing, particularly due to many Latvians stranded because of the COVID-19 pandemic returning to Latvia and choosing to commit crime. According to Interpol, Latvia is considered an attractive place for regional and organized criminals involved in drug trafficking, arms trafficking, human trafficking, or smuggling. According to the Central Statistical Bureau of Latvia, a third of all women in Latvia have suffered some form of sexual violence or rape, while men are subjected to violence outside the family.
The United List is a centrist to centre-right, regionalist and green conservative political alliance in Latvia established to contest the 2022 parliamentary election. The list consists of the Latvian Green Party, the Latvian Association of Regions, the Liepāja Party, as well as the "United List of Latvia" association led by Liepāja construction contractor Uldis Pīlēns.
