Following the European Central Bank's decision to continue the Eurosystem's expanded asset purchase program after March 2017, favorable financing conditions for Lithuania, its businesses and private individuals, will remain in place in the coming years.

The Lithuanian port of Klaipeda, which has in the past three years stood out in the Eastern Baltic Sea region for its cargo traffic growth, expects to keep growing next year and plans to expand its infrastructure to double its annual tonnage to 80 million tons in 2025.

Lithuania's largest haulage companies are investing in establishment of own rest areas for their drivers in Western Europe in response to stricter regulation of drivers' rest procedures and lack of space in public truck parking areas, vz.lt news portal said on Monday.

The price of electricity in Nord Pool Spot's Lithuanian bidding area last week averaged 37.3 euros per megawatt-hour, up by 0.8% from the previous week, but down by one-fifth from the year-earlier level, Litgrid said on Monday.

Lithuania's state energy group Lietuvos Energija (Lithuanian Energy) and European Investment Bank (EIB) on Monday signed a loan of 190 mln euros for the biomass and waste-fired cogeneration plant in Vilnius.

During a follow-up public offering of Baltic Horizon Fund, a recently listed closed-end real estate fund, investors subscribed units worth 20.6 million euros and the fund has decided to allocate each investor all units they subscribed for.

With its accounts being frozen by a court, Vilniaus Energija (Vilnius Energy), a local district heating supplier controlled by France's Veolia, is not paying Danpower Baltic, a German-Lithuanian joint venture, for the heat energy its has produced.

As the new Vilnius office of Exadel, an international software engineering company, opens its doors, the company has announced ambitious plans to grow its operations in Lithuania. The US-based company currently employs over 50 specialists in Lithuania, and is now planning to recruit a further 150 staff in the coming two years. This recruitment drive is part of a long-term, five-year development plan for which the company plans to invest €19 million.

Electricity prices for most consumers in Lithuania are set to decline by 8.3% next year.

Assessing the general development trends of commercial property in Lithuania, it can be seen that currently the eyes of commercial property developers are essentially focused on only certain segments and certain cities – Vilnius and Kaunas. In Vilnius, the office and hotel segments are the subjects of special attention, whereas in Kaunas, it seems that there is a real boom in the construction of office projects. In other regions of the country, investments in the development of commercial property are substantially scarcer – generally, we see the construction of grocery and construction materials’ shops, as well as the renovation of already-existing shopping centres or a few industrial purpose projects in the free economic zones of Lithuania.