December 2017 | Lithuanian Embassy Newsletter 1

STUDENTS FROM INDIA TOP THE RANKS OF

FOREIGN STUDENTS IN LITHUANIA

A total of 355 students from India joined Lithuanian universities in 2017, effectively making them the largest foreign student group in the country, Lithuania’s Re-search and Higher Education Monitoring and Analysis Centre (MOSTA in Lithuanian) reports.

According to the MOSTA’s research paper published last month, 1,846 foreign students enrolled in Lithua-nian universities in 2017, of which 355 came from In-dia, 273 from Belarus, 158 from Ukraine, 67 from Ger-many, 50 from Bangladesh and the remaining 943 from various other countries.

43% of all foreign students in 2017 were recruited in Asia, the data shows.

These numbers starkly contrast with the situation only five years ago, when 69% of all foreign students in 2012 were originating in the former soviet republics, with countries like Belarus, Ukraine and Russia topping the list.

Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences and Vilnius University received the largest number of foreign students in 2017.

“Attraction of foreign students is important to Lithuania for two reasons. First, it helps the universi-ties cope with the declining share of local students due to demographic situation in the country. And second, it also benefits our labor market, where the demand of professionals in IT, engineering, and aviation is grow-ing fast,” says Gintautas Jakštas, an analyst at MOSTA.

He also agrees, however, that the success of keeping the graduating foreigners in the local market has so far been limited. Only 7% of the foreigners who graduated

in 2014-16 have stayed, of which 28% were Russian, 24% Belarusian and 17% Ukrainian nationals.

Indians figure at the bottom of this list. The MOSTA paper also reveals the discrepancy bet-

ween the number of the students who enroll and those who actually graduate. Thus, among all foreign fresh-men in Lithuania, Indian nationals constitute 18% of the total number, while among the BA and MA level graduates they make up only 8%.

MOSTA’s experts urge the government to relax the existing labor laws to allow foreign students a more flexible employment procedure. The government has already amended the Law on Legal Status of Aliens, permitting the graduating foreigners to extend their visa by six months to give them an opportunity to find a job in the local market.

MOSTA also encourage the universities to invest more in Lithuanian language courses for foreigners. Helping the foreign students connect with their poten-tial future employers through designated couching and internship programs would be advisable too, MOSTA insists.

See full report here (in Lithuanian) Source: mosta.lt

FM LINKEVIČIUS: INDIA & LITHUANIA DO NOT

HAVE ISSUES THEY CANNOT RESOLVE

(INTERVIEW)

Linas Linkevičius, Lithuania’s Foreign Minister, vi-sited Mumbai for the first time in October. Lithuania, a member of the European Union, is celebrating 100 years of restoration of its independence and 25 years of the establishment of diplomatic relations with India. He spoke with G2’s CEO and Editor Abhinav Aggar-wal on the objectives of his visit.

NEWSLETTER DECEMBER 2017

December 2017 | Lithuanian Embassy Newsletter 2

- What is the reason for your visit to Mum-bai? What outcomes do you expect?

My visit to Mumbai is part of a larger India visit pro-gram. I was in New Delhi and had very fruitful meetings with the Hon’ble Vice President Venkaiah Naidu, and the External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. The Lith-uanian National Symphony Orchestra gave a fabulous concert at Mumbai’s NCPA. The concert was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the restoration of Indepen-dent Lithuania. In Mumbai, we also hope to open a new page in Indo-Lithuanian cooperation. I was invited to speak at the Mumbai Port Trust about the Klaipėda Sea Port of Lithuania, one of the largest in our region. I have also met representatives of Maharashtra to explore po-tential areas of partnership.

- What are Lithuania’s economic interests in Mumbai/ Maharashtra? Are there success sto-ries to tell?

Maharashtra is the strongest state of India from the economic point of view. And Lithuania is one of the fastest growing economies of the European Union. So there definitely is potential for successful exchange. IT, pharma, biotechnologies make the cornerstone of Lith-uania’s rapid growth in the 21st century. We do not have natural resources like gas and oil. But we do have 3 million highly talented people, 40% of whom have a university degree and speak at least two foreign lan-guages. These talented and educated people make Lith-uania a favorite destination for international investors. As part of the Single European Market and member of the Eurozone, Lithuania can also facilitate your access to the European market as a whole. We believe that Mumbai-based businesses will take interest in using Lithuania as their gateway to the larger European Union market.

- How are Lithuania’s overall relations with India developing? Any potential areas of coope-ration you would like to further?

This year India and Lithuania celebrate the 25th an-niversary of their diplomatic relations. These 25 years have been marked by mutual respect and goodwill coming from both sides. We do not have issues we can-not solve – this is our mutual bottom line. And the re-sults of the meetings I have had during this visit only lends credence to this approach. I believe India and Lithuania could do more in trade. Over the last few years our trade has more than doubled, but still remains rather low in overall terms. With this view in mind, I was more than happy to talk to the Indian com-panies at the Mumbai Port Trust. We have to invest in connectivity between our countries to make business deals easier.

Also, Lithuania is emerging as an attractive destina-tion for Indian students. Their numbers in our univer-sities have increased from 50 to 800 in less than five years. Lithuanian students and researchers could make use of the Indian institutions of higher education like IIT Bombay or Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. EU-sponsored programs, like Erasmus Plus, make such exchange rather simple.

Last but not the least, I would like more cultural ex-change projects to take place. The Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra’s visit was a good starting point. Perhaps representatives of other art fields from Lithu-

ania—contemporary art or dance performers—could al-so come and play in Mumbai. I know this city is famous for its vibrant cultural life; it is also home to Bollywood. It would be great if your performers would be presented in Lithuania as well.

- India is becoming a powerful global player in the 21st century. How do you see India’s role in the global security context?

India is the world’s largest democracy. And in times when democratic ideals are increasingly challenged, In-dia’s role only grows in importance. We must join our efforts if we want to win over terrorism, economic poverty, social and digital disparity. MoS for External Affairs, M.J.Akbar, said during his recent visit to Lithu-ania that India stands as the last bastion of stability vis-a-vis growing turbulence in Western Asia. West off In-dia, the situation is not good; east off India, the situa-tion is still good and will stay good as long as India grows and successfully copes with her domestic and external challenges. For better or worse, Lithuania is also in a somewhat similar situation: to the east, auto-cratic regimes trample on the remains of democratic credentials; to the west, the situation is still good, al-though we all know what difficulties the EU is facing. So we have to stand firm and defend what we believe is important.

- Any important historical connections bet-ween Lithuania and Mumbai that you could tell us about?

The first Lithuanian who landed in India in 1625, did so in Goa, not so far away from Mumbai. But another prominent Lithuanian, Antanas Poška, arrived in India through the Port of Bombay in 1931. Poška was a trave-ler and adventurer, whose travel diaries shaped our opinion about India for decades. Poška spent almost two years in Bombay and graduated from the Univer-sity of Bombay in 1933. He interacted with all the lea-ding professors of that time, including J.J.Modi and N.A.Thooti. Poška also met Mahatma Gandhi while he was in Bombay.

Today Mumbai is home to another celebrated Lithu-anian, Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, owner of Cipla Ltd. Dr. Ha-mied was born in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. His mother, Luba Derczanska, was a Lithuanian Jew. Of course, Dr. Hamied is a proud Indian in the first place. But his amazing life story continues inspiring those of us who believe in a truly global, border-free world.

Source: G2 Glamour & Glory, Dec/Jan 2018 issue

BOOKING.COM WILL OPEN AN OFFICE

IN VILNIUS

December 2017 | Lithuanian Embassy Newsletter 3

Booking.com, the global leader in connecting trave-lers with the widest selection of great places to stay, an-nounced on 4 December its plans to open a customer call center in Vilnius in April 2018. The Vilnius office will be the company’s first call center in the Baltic Region and eighteenth globally.

The new establishment will support Booking.com’s 24/7 service to guests and accommodation partners through a variety of channels, including incoming calls, e-mails and messaging. It will create almost 200 jobs by the end of 2018, with a goal of hiring up to 900 people within the next four to five years.

The open positions include operational manage-ment roles, as well as front-line customer service execu-tive positions to work with customers around the world, providing service in a variety of languages including Russian, German, English, Polish, Estonian, and Lithu-anian. Applicants can apply directly at workingatbook-ing.com.

“Vilnius is emerging as a real regional capital in Europe, truly embodying the multinational culture that exists at Booking.com,” says James Waters, Global Di-rector of Customer Service at Booking.com. “There is a rich pool of talent in Vilnius, particularly with the lin-guistic skill sets that we’re looking for. As such, we are looking forward to continuing to expand our employee base throughout the Baltics.”

To select the location for the new call center, Booking.com teamed up with Invest Lithuania, a team of experienced business advisors assisting global busi-nesses to expand into Vilnius.

“We are excited that Booking.com recognized the benefits of locating in Vilnius – the main benefit being access to this region’s talented workforce. We are a dy-namic, multicultural region with a rich heritage and a large portion of our population speaking multiple lan-guages,” says Mantas Katinas, Managing Director of In-vest Lithuania.

Booking.com’s new customer service facility will be located in Technopolis, Lithuania’s largest ‘office city.’

The 42,000 sq. foot office will cover two floors. Its theme, created by the Dutch architect Arnold Schoor-dijk from ATC Schoordijk Interieurontwerp, draws on different elements of Lithuanian culture, history and nature for inspiration.

Quotes from Lithuanian writers will feature throu-ghout the office while colors and artwork inspired by the country’s forests and seas will be used for decora-tion in meeting rooms and team areas.

Source: Invest Lithuania

BLOOMBERG: THIS COUNTRY WANTS

A PIECE OF LONDON’S FINTECH

Lithuania reckons it can issue a license more quick-ly than anyone else in the European Union, Bloom-berg’s Milda Šeputytė reports.

Prajit Nanu was in a hurry to find a European base to expand his fintech startup from Singapore. He reck-oned it would be a year or more to get an e-money license in the U.K. or Germany. Then he stumbled upon a brochure touting a country that initially was not on his radar.

Lithuania, a nation of 2.8m people with no real pedi-gree in the technology side of banking and finance, was offering to get him up and running in three months. Now he is preparing to start his European operations in February.

“It seemed impossible, to be honest,” said Nanu, chief executive officer of Vertex Ventures-backed Insta ReM, which provides cross-border payments services in more than 40 countries. But after consulting his law-yer and contacting Lithuanian officials, he went ahead. “People like us don’t want to wait a long time for a licen-se. Time to market is very important.”

The Baltic state, an unwilling part of the Soviet Un-ion until 1990, is positioning itself as the amenable backdoor to the European Union and euro region for developers of everything from payment networks to foreign-currency services and gaming firms.

Lithuania has been in the shadow of neighboring Es-tonia when it comes to embracing all things tech, while Latvia next door has been plagued by a string of money-laundering scandals in recent years.

But with Brexit weighing on London, Europe’s tradi-tional finance hub, the country is targeting a global fin-tech market that’s attracted more than $125bn of inves-tment since 2010.

As well as Nanu’s firm, currency and international payments app Revolut Ltd. and money-transfer busi-ness Contis Group are among the 38 companies that have received or have bid for Lithuanian fintech licen-ses this year.

The central banks reckons the U.K.’s plan to leave the EU has thrown up an opportunity to help foster a more competitive financial services industry in Lithu-ania.

“Now everyone is looking to have some share of the pie,” central bank board member Marius Jurgilas said in an interview in Vilnius, the capital. “Some of the peo-ple are scavengers doing it just because they want their share. We have an intricate reason why we're doing it.”

Lithuania’s fintech mission began about a year ago, with the central bank holding roadshows from Tokyo to London. In the past month, it has met investors in Sin-gapore, Japan and China.

It offers a specialized banking license with the euro zone’s lowest initial capital requirement, 1 million euros ($1.2m). That includes access to the Single Euro Payments Area, permitting electronic payments across the euro region. The U.K.’s departure from the EU meanwhile has cast uncertainty over the ‘passporting’

December 2017 | Lithuanian Embassy Newsletter 4

rights that let offices in the British capital provide services across the bloc.

London-based Revolut, which has raised more than $86m in venture capital, applied for a European ban-king license in Lithuania last month. Its Baltic head, Andrius Biceika, said that unlike in other countries, it was easy to reach the decision makers at the central bank.

“We met the people we needed to meet right from the beginning,” he said. “We want to mitigate risks from the potential consequences of Brexit.”

Nanu said that as well as fast license issuance, his company has unearthed talented programmers at a lower cost than elsewhere in Europe. “There are many benefits of applying for a license in Lithuania,” he said.

Source: Bloomberg.com

HOW 41 PEOPLE IN LITHUANIA TOOK OVER

YOUR FACEBOOK FEED

Of all of Facebook’s superpowers, perhaps the most disconcerting is how it can make online publishers dis-appear with the push of a button, Kevin Roose of The New York Times reports.

Think I’m exaggerating? Just look at what happened to websites like Upworthy, Viralnova and Distractify, which amassed enormous Facebook followings and then faded from view after the site’s algorithm started to weed out pages that published hyperbolic headlines and low-value fluff. Other publishers that depend on Facebook for a large portion of their traffic – which is to say, most of them – fear they could be next under the guillotine.

But there is also a remarkable story about longevity in the Facebook publishing world. It comes, improbab-ly, from Vilnius, Lithuania, where a small but mighty digital publisher is successfully navigating the changing tides of Facebook’s algorithms. Its story illustrates the qualities needed to survive in today’s Facebook-domi-nated digital media world: agility, lean operations, a clearly defined brand and a fair bit of luck.

The company, Bored Panda, might not be familiar to you. But if you have a Facebook account and a pulse, you’ve probably seen its handiwork. Maybe it was “10+ Before-and-After Pics That Prove Men Look Better With Beards,” or “41 Times Uber Drivers Surprised Their Clients.” Or perhaps you watched “Shh, Don’t Wake Them,” a 49-second video montage of dogs, cats and hamsters sleeping peacefully.

Lightweight and inoffensive posts like these have made Bored Panda one of the biggest attractions on Fa-cebook. Its page received more than 30m likes, shares, comments and reactions last month, far more than companies like BuzzFeed, CNN and The New York Ti-mes, according to NewsWhip, which compiles data on social media publishers. Its website had 116m visitors in October, according to its internal analytics.

The company has done all this without raising out-side funding, unlike digital powerhouses such as Buzz-Feed and Vice, which have collected hundreds of mil-lions of dollars. It also has only 41 employees, and the low operating costs, along with its enormous popula-rity, have made for good business.

Tomas Banišauskas, Bored Panda’s founder, told me he expects to be profitable this year with $20m to $30m in revenue, mostly from the advertisements that appear on its website. Roughly 90% of its web traffic co-mes from Facebook, making the social network by far the biggest factor in Bored Panda’s success.

“They’re a really helpful company for us,” Banišaus-kas, 31, said of Facebook.

Bored Panda began as a side project in 2009, while Banišauskas, then a freelance videographer, was study-ing business administration at Vilnius University. He was inspired by feats of internet creativity like the Mil-lion Dollar Homepage, in which an entrepreneur auc-tioned off a million pixels on a website for $1 each. And he came up with the idea for a website that would, as he put it, “fight boredom with art and good news stories.”

On the content side, Bored Panda’s strategy follow-ed a familiar playbook. It collected user-generated con-tent from Reddit, Instagram, Twitter and other social platforms and repackaged it with tempting headlines. But by focusing on art, photography and other creative pursuits, and by studiously sticking to the kind of apo-litical content that few people object to, Bored Panda has steadily built a feel-good, escapist empire.

Bored Panda has the advantage of getting most of its content free from up-and-coming artists and other creative types who want the kind of exposure a large Fa-cebook page can bring. (And, yes, it does ask for per-mission. I contacted several artists whose work had been featured on Bored Panda, and all said they’d given their blessing.)

It has also adopted a quality-over-quantity strategy that appears to have served it well. It published only 519 articles in October, or roughly 16 posts a day, according to NewsWhip. Compare that with CNN, which publish-ed 5,595 articles during the month, and Fox News, which published 51,919 articles.

It hasn’t been a straight line to success. In its early days, Bored Panda relied on StumbleUpon, a link ag-gregation site that was popular at the time, for much of its traffic. But in 2010, according to Banišauskas, Stum-bleUpon sharply reduced Bored Panda’s prominence on the site and pressured him to buy ads instead.

As Banišauskas would later write in a post on Me-dium, the experience taught him that “the only way to survive in this industry is to build long-term value through loyal followers.”

The next several years were a struggle, but in 2013, Bored Panda began to see a spike in viewers being sent from a new source: Facebook. Its positive, lighthearted content was a hit with the social network’s users, and the site’s traffic grew tenfold in a single year. Soon, de-

December 2017 | Lithuanian Embassy Newsletter 5

spite Banišauskas’s intentions, Bored Panda was far from self-sufficient – its prospects hinged almost enti-rely on Facebook.

More recently, while its competitors have hedged their risks by diversifying away from Facebook, Bored Panda has made a conscious effort to pull the platform even closer. It has started several offshoot Facebook brands, including pages for art and animal-themed sto-ries, and a page called Crafty Panda that focuses on D.I.Y. projects. It has begun creating original content, too, and recently set up a video studio in its office, a hospital from the 19th century that was converted into a tech office complex.

“Everyone wants to be not so dependent on Face-book,” Banišauskas told me. “At the same time, it’s im-possible – Facebook is the place where people share their ideas.”

But dependence comes with real risk. Last month, for example, Facebook began testing a new design for its news feed. In this version, which is being tested in six countries, Facebook posts from pages (including bu-sinesses, public figures and publishers like Bored Pan-da) were removed from the regular news feed. They we-re placed in a separate section called “Explore Feed,” where they appeared less prominently.

This change caused tremors in the Facebook publi-shing world. Several publishers from countries inclu-ded in the test complained that their Facebook traffic had plummeted overnight. A social media manager from a news site in Slovakia, one of the countries inclu-ded in the test, called it the “biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have ever seen.”

Facebook told me it planned to continue testing the Explore Feed changes for several more months.

Rafat Ali, a digital publishing veteran and chief exe-cutive of the travel media company Skift, said that while these particular algorithmic changes might not come to pass, sites like Bored Panda could still be easily crushed by a future Facebook experiment.

“You never know when the rug could be pulled from under them,” Mr. Ali said. “They could be done in a year or two.”

Banišauskas knows that Facebook can be a fickle landlord, and he worries that as a small foreign com-pany that specializes in aggregated entertainment con-tent, Bored Panda is in a more precarious position than most. Roughly half of Bored Panda’s Facebook audi-ence is American, and Banišauskas worries that the site could be punished inadvertently by efforts to combat fake news and Russian-style influence campaigns.

“We’re not part of the problem,” he said, “but we could get the collateral damage.”

Last summer, Banišauskas traveled to New York to meet with a group of other Facebook-focused publi-shers. All these companies produce entertaining mate-rial that reaches millions of people every day. In ano-ther era, that alone might have been enough to guaran-tee them a stable future. Today, they exist at Facebook’s mercy and might be wiped away at any moment.

For now, though, Bored Panda is charging ahead, and hoping to remain on Facebook’s good side.

“Everyone should be worried,” Banišauskas said, before he injected a note of Bored Panda-style positi-vity: “But I believe everything will work out well.”

Source: The New York Times

LITHUANIAN CONDUCTOR, SELECTED AMONG

TOP-28 MOST INFLUENTIAL EUROPEANS 2018,

HOPES BREXIT WON’T LEAVE HER HOMELESS

If Brexit Britain wants to prove it remains open to the world, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla might be just the tic-ket. The young, energetic Lithuanian conductor is the music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, one of the UK’s most prestigious musical institutions, which will embark on tours in Europe next year. She will also debut with the Orchestre Philharmo-nique de Radio France in January, and makes her Car-negie Hall debut in May with the Met Opera Orchestra.

The Brussels-based European affairs weekly, politi-co.eu, has also ranked Gražinytė-Tyla as the 27th most influential European in the Politico 28 list of the people most likely to shape our world in 2018.

Born to a musical family in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, Gražinytė-Tyla began studying music at age 11. On finishing school, she left for the Austrian city of Graz to master her trade. She later added the Lithuanian word “Tyla”, meaning silence, to create her stage name.

“It is not necessary at all to use words in order to communicate through music,” she says. “Once you’ve experienced how this communication works you get ad-dicted and cannot stop.” She was chosen to lead the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2016 by its members, making her one of the world’s few top female conductors.

Gražinytė-Tyla, 31, describes her new home – the former manufacturing powerhouse in the center of England – as the “Venice of Great Britain.” She feels “very good” in the “moving, changing and beautiful city full of air and water.”

Britain’s looming exit from the European Union adds an element of uncertainty to Gražinytė-Tyla’s abi-lity to live and work in her adopted home – despite as-surances from the UK government it wants EU citizens to stay, and welcomes the brightest and the best, a con-crete deal has not yet been struck. Brexit could also mean young talent from Lithuania will have a harder time following in her footsteps.

Asked how she feels about the UK soon leaving the bloc, Gražinytė-Tyla skirts the question to strike a more hopeful note: She hopes “all of our future steps will bring us closer and to a deeper understanding of each other.”

Source: politico.eu © Photo by Lawrence K. Ho / LA Times

December 2017 | Lithuanian Embassy Newsletter 6

HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR OPENS ART MUSEUM

IN HOMETOWN VILNIUS

Painter and Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak on 20 November opened a museum of his allegorical work in-spired by Jewish history in the Lithuanian capital Vil-nius, more than half a century after he held his first ex-hibition as a nine-year-old inside its wartime ghetto.

As a boy, he was sent to live in the ghetto after the German Nazis occupied the city in 1941 during World War II.

He survived — unlike most of his family — by hiding in a Catholic convent, and fled to Israel after the war with his mother. He now lives in the United States.

“I have lived in so many different countries. But I am from Vilna (Vilnius), I identify myself with this city,” Bak, now 84, told AFP, referring to the Hebrew name of the city.

“For me to be here is somehow to come back to the very beginning of the beginning. It is also a possibility to express my gratitude to Christians who helped me survive,” he said before the opening ceremony attended by several hundred people.

Bak donated more than 60 of his paintings — with dozens more to come — to the Samuel Bak Museum, which will officially be part of the state-funded Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum.

“Bak’s work weaves together personal history and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holo-caust experience,” said the Pucker Gallery that repre-sents him.

Instead of presenting death directly, Bak uses alle-gory and substitution, such as showing a child’s toys instead of the murdered children who once played with them.

Lithuania’s Culture Minister Liana Ruokytė-Jons-son hailed Bak’s return to Vilnius as “a testimony that the effort of annihilation does not triumph in the end.”

Pre-war Lithuania was home to a thriving Jewish community, with Vilnius a hub of learning known as the ‘Jerusalem of the North.’

Around 1,95,000 Lithuanian Jews died under the 1941-44 German occupation. Today there are around 3,000 Jews living in the NATO and EU member of 2.8m people.

Community leader Faina Kukliansky said the muse-um “will become yet another sign of the extraordinary Jewish cultural heritage in Lithuania and the world.”

Source: AFP, The Times of Israel

‘NOW THAT REALLY IS A CHRISTMAS TREE!’

VILNIUS FESTIVE SPECTACULAR FEATURES

70,000 BULBS AND 900 TOYS

The Lithuanian capital Vilnius marked the start of the holiday season by lighting a 90ft tall tree at Cathe-dral Square on 1 December.

One of Europe’s brightest Christmas trees has been lit up with an incredible 70,000 bulbs.

Covered with 900 Christmas toys, the massive con-struction is so bright it can easily be seen from an air-plane on its descent to Vilnius Airport.

Traditionally, Vilnius’ Christmas tree is made up of a metal frame covered in decorations and spruce bran-ches – leftovers from forestry work.

With a total surface area of 2,500 square meters, the huge tree is drawing the crowds throughout the Christ-mas period.

City lights surrounding the tree are dimmed for the Christmas Fairy Tale in 3D; a special animated story that is projected onto the wall of Vilnius Cathedral.

For several years now, the Vilnius Christmas tree has been acknowledged as one of Europe’s most beau-tiful. This year is no exception.

Source: Mirror Daily © Photo by Saulius Žiūra

SEASON’S GREETINGS TO THE READERS

OF OUR NEWSLETTER!

SEE YOU IN 2018!