Training: Understanding Investment Readiness

On November 19th, project partners in the ReInd-BBG Project, Vojvodina Development Agency (RAV) from Serbia and MKBT: Make Better Association from Romania, jointly organized and conducted the training titled “Understanding Investment Readiness.” The purpose of the training was to provide an investor’s perspective in the assessment of reindustrialisation projects and to educate project partners on the most effective ways to attract investments in brownfield projects, both from regional and local viewpoints. 

Mr. Ivan Borovčanin from the Vojvodina Development Agency, who is the Investment Advisor for the project and has 18 years of experience in attracting and facilitating foreign direct investments, led the first part of the training by presenting the story of RAV and its extensive experience in investment facilitation. This includes activities such as promotion, services, and aftercare.

What is investment readiness? It is the ability to attract and secure investments that are best suited to your location. This ability improves over time as you gain more knowledge about your environment (location, infrastructure, accessibility, business climate, available workforce, stakeholders, existence of planning documentation, etc.). The more you know about your location, municipality, or region—and the related stakeholders—the easier it becomes to identify opportunities and weaknesses and to develop an effective investment promotion strategy.

The Vojvodina region established the agency responsible for attracting foreign investments at the end of 2004, with the primary goal of significantly reducing the high unemployment rate and finding new owners for numerous brownfield facilities-previously state-owned factories and companies. Today, after 20 years of successful investment attraction, the region hosts nearly 500 foreign companies that have invested €12 billion and created more than 100,000 new jobs.

The local-level perspective was provided by MKBT - Make Better Association, an organization dedicated to urban regeneration and a long-term partner of Reșița Municipality. In the presentation titled “Building a Case for Investing in Reșița,” Mrs. Marina Batog emphasized the key elements involved in preparing a location to be investment-ready. In addition to external factors—over which local municipalities have no control, such as economic stability, growth prospects, access to finance, and labor costs - there are many aspects of the business environment that local authorities can improve. These include the quality of life for employees (such as healthcare systems and affordable housing), the availability and quality of necessary infrastructure, business-friendly local regulations, and available business support structures. 

The local municipality’s capacity to attract investors can be increased by promoting strengths and addressing weaknesses. This process has been followed by Reșița Municipality, initiated with the support of MKBT, and it has proven to be a successful strategy for increasing Reșița’s attractiveness and visibility as a potential investment location. After eight years in this process, the municipality has made considerable progress in attracting businesses to populate its industrial park and developers to invest in its latent brownfields.