The biggest company is government-owned Royal Greenland, the largest supplier of prawns, halibut and cod in Denmark, and with about 2,300 staff, the biggest employer in Greenland. The company, which projects revenues of €603m this year, operates in 12 countries in Europe and around the world. However, Royal Greenland is closing two of its plants in Greenland, and spending €15.5m on a new plant in Koszalin, Poland – a project supported with a €5.3m EU grant. The move is reportedly due to stiff international competition. The largest private company is Polar Seafoods, with 800 employees – including 550 in Greenland – and revenues of about €187m in 2005. Financial director Henrik Krogh says operating according to local conditions is imperative. For example, Polar only delivers raw product to smaller ports at times that do not conflict with the hunting season when local workers will not be on hand to process fish at the plant, he says. The company's long-term issues include global warming, which is predicted to reduce shrimp stocks, although Krogh says the company has seen less evidence of this than has been projected. State-owned TELE Greenland handles communications throughout the island, and has various partnerships with network operators throughout Europe.

Other key public players include shipper Royal Arctic Line, fur trader Great Greenland and Air Greenland, which links Danish and Greenlandic communities through Kangerlussuaq, the former US air base on Greenland's west coast. The airline is slated to start direct service with Baltimore in spring 2007, opening up direct service with the Americas. Watchers say the move – combined with rising temperatures (global warming is not some theory here; the ice is visibly receding), more travel for company team-building and business retreats, and the growing interest in offbeat adventure holidays– has big implications. Tourism is already growing after a decade of public investment. Perhaps as many as 35,000 foreign tourists came in 2006; a record number of British, German, Dutch and other cruise ships, 21 in all, made 130 calls at Nuuk in 2005, according to the tourism council.

German giant Siemens landed a contract with TELE Greenland – neither will disclose the amount – in November 2005 to construct a satellite-based mobile and high-speed internet system. Land-based phone systems to connect Greenland's municipalities, like roads, are not economically feasible given the icy conditions and great distances. In another sector, Swiss investment group ThoCon and a local partner are reportedly investing €40m to bottle mineral water for the international market. In a sign of new priorities, the government chose the ThoCon group for the concession over a public consortium. Deloitte is here, as is Ramboll, a leading Danish engineering consultancy. Ramboll's local managing director, Niels Erik Hagelqvist, describes accelerating growth that requires plenty of infrastructure projects, including water treatment plants, stores and warehouses, water pipelines and airport expansions. Local start-ups include a sleek magazine for women called Arnanut, microbreweries, and two tiny cottage industries spurred by rising temperatures: cattle breeding and potato growing. These industries, combined with the fourfold increase in farmland acreage from warmer weather since 1980, are touted as signs of more agricultural self-sufficiency. Global warming may eventually have catastrophic effects, but is creating this local benefit at present.

Key sectors are privatising, albeit to varying degrees and levels of success. The trend is evident in telecommunications, where locally owned InuitCOM has made inroads; and in retail, where two Danish chains, Brugsen and Dagrofa, are competing. Dagrofa, signalling the private sector's growing role, has bought one-third of Greenland's Pisiffik supermarket chain from state-owned KNI Holding. There have been potholes on the road to privatisation. In November 2005, the government sold its Arctic Umiaq Line to a consortium of Danish travel bureaux for about €8.5m, only to reacquire it a few months later, after the venture posted big losses and headlines. In another sector, a majority stake in NunaMinerals, a Greenlandic mineral exploration company, has been privatised. Asked if his company is a harbinger of economic things to come, director Ole Christiansen answers: 'I don't know, but I'd really like it to be.' For that to happen, Christiansen says, Greenland should import more skilled workers, a politically charged issue when lawmakers instead call for native workers, local skills and jobs.

Robust debate about such things will be part of any realistic process toward self-sufficiency, says Ole Kielmann Hansen, director of kit A/S, an IT support company that services Greenland's municipalities. As Hansen sees it, other keys to transforming Greenland will be encouraging agriculture, importing more labour, reforming home rule's spending and administrative practices, hammering out an oil-fund formula with Denmark, liberalising the telecommunications sector, more diverse and in-depth media coverage of issues and setting higher standards in schools. Polar Seafoods' Krogh echoes this last point: education is key. Poppel also agrees, adding that a more self-reliant economy will require more home-grown workers trained to compete in the global economy. Along these lines, there are new business and management training programmes, and an Innovation Centre that will connect business and academia opened in Greenland's second city, Sisimiut, in September 2005. Hansen adds that Greenland is a regulated but open society with significant potential 'for those with the right international strategy'.