fdi leaders

Our colleague Richard who is based in Germany has been in the UK to follow up our interests in renewable energy:  

This week Manchester played host to RenewableUK 2011 one of the UK’s leading wind, marine and tidal energy industry events.  More than 300 companies exhibited, and over 5,000 delegates from around the world attended the conference. 

This year’s event took place in light of the UK’s government recent publication of proposals for the levels of banded support available for large scale renewable electricity generation under the Renewables Obligation for the period 2013-17 in England and Wales.  The Scottish Government also published a consultation paper (Oct 21) on changes to the Renewables Obligation (Scotland) with consultation closing on 13^th January 2012.  Information on both announcements and details of the consultation process can be found on the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s website http://www.decc.gov.uk/.

The three introductory speeches at RenewableUK all focused on the significant opportunity the wind sector offers in the UK, especially with the plans to significantly expand the offshore wind capacity around the UK coastline by 2020.  It was quoted that the UK should be able to create up to 80,000 new jobs from investments in the wind sector alone.  There is certainly a huge opportunity here for communities to attract significant inward investment projects (20 new factories were highlighted as possible) and at the same time develop their indigenous companies with experience in subsea engineering etc. gained from the oil and gas and offshore sectors.

There does remain however a danger that if the necessary investment in port infrastructure is not made quickly enough then the turbines and other major components for offshore projects will simply be shipped from overseas ports with access to the North Sea.  In this respect the German government’s announcement, made after the Fukushima disaster, to switch off all its nuclear power stations by 2022 and invest heavily in renewable energy (notably offshore wind) and energy efficiency technologies should be noted.  The government there has recently increased its offshore wind tariff to 19 Eurocents / kwh for projects completed from 2012 onwards and it has also launched a € 5 billion co-investment fund for offshore wind financing, managed by the government KfW Bank.  Two projects have already won financing deals from this fund (Meerwind and Global Tech I) and we can expect to see the German offshore wind sector now enter a period of commercial development in the next two years and beyond, competing for investment, components and know-how with other European locations.

Contact us if you want to learn more about this opportunity.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has been looking at the power and connections of corporations.  In an article in New Scientist the Zurich team of researchers has looked at the world’s 37 million companies, identifying 43,060 transnational corporations, of which a core of 1,318 are connected to each other, forming the backbone of the global economy.  Within this group, 147 of the companies are classified as highly connected to each other, accounting for 40% of the total wealth of the core network.    Many of the super-connected are financial institutions, with Barclays plc placed at the top of the list.  No surprise then that Financial Services has been one of the top three FDI sectors over the last decade…

Business process outsourcing (BPO) continues to play a big part in the FDI market.  We are aware of several large BPO projects currently mobile in Europe.  These projects can create a lot of jobs and bring the latest processes and technologies to a location.  A win-win for investment promotion agencies!  Next week in London, the International Outsourcing Forum will be looking at the latest trends in BPO and location selection, and the delegate list of corporates attending looks pretty impressive.

We are always interested in looking at where technology is taking us in terms of new businesses and growth industries.  Our radar has picked up some exciting stories in the area of water technology.

With significant global water challenges ahead, including water scarcity; flooding; sanitation; pollution; and ageing infrastructure, we are seeing technological innovation in countries such as the US, Israel, France, Canada, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany and Spain.

The water market is now one of the fastest growing in the world, and water is emerging as an important investment theme.  This is one to watch for future fdi growth.