Engineering and metalworking in Estonia is full of traditions with a history dating back to the second half of the 19th century. Today it is a growing modern industry with strong links to the Scandinavian and Western European engineering clusters, where most of the standards have been directly adopted from the European standards  

The main production areas currently found are metals and fabricated metal products, motor vehicles, trailers and semi-trailers, other transport equipment, machinery and equipment, working tools.

Electronics, IT and telecommunication are now one of the fastest developing areas in Estonia’s economy. The choice of foreign investors to outsource production operations to Estonia, has contributed to the tremendous growth in this sector. Industrial production of electronic industry has grown almost fifteen times during the past ten years. Furthermore, the shift from labour intensive production to more complex and higher value-added operations is further contributing to the rising competitiveness of the Estonian electronics industry.

The largest sub-sector of the Estonian electronics industry is the manufacturing of electrical machinery and apparatus, which accounts for 36.7 % of the total output. Telecommunication equipment constitutes 34.1 % of the total, followed by medical, precision and optical instruments with 22.2 %. Assembly of computers and office equipment makes up 7 % of the total output.

Wood processing manufacturers are competitive mostly thanks to their reasonable price-quality ratio. This means that the prices of Estonian companies are lower than those of West European enterprises but the quality is higher than the one offered by Polish and other Baltic manufacturers. Estonian producers price their products based on market situation and the costs incurred. Here, most companies apply cost-based pricing.

The furniture industry accounts for approximately 9 % of all Estonian exports. The main export markets for wood products are Finland and Germany, followed by Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Great Britain.

Biotechnology in Estonia is developing from the two ends of the pipeline, namely research and production. Today, more than 15 different research institutions are directly linked to the field of biotechnology and 11 main biotech companies acquire competencies in the following areas:

·        Custom designed chip development;

·        Genotyping based on Arrayed Primer Extension technology (APEX);

·        Functional genomic and proteomic services and equipment (epitope tagging technology);

·        DNA analyses (finding DNA variations);

·        DNA vaccine development (HIV, cancer);

·        Applications of transgenic animal technologies