The Czech community present at the first edition of the “Czech Investments in Romania Roundtable” organized in mid – November by The Diplomat, has reached a common optimistic vision regarding our country, concluding that Romania keeps heading towards a positive direction.
Moderated by Philip Smitka, Associated Partner at Noerr in the Prague office, the conference gathered diplomats, experts and important players to analyze and compare the main opportunities and challenges of Romania. While Romania is still facing several disadvantages such as lack of infrastructure, low public investments, instability of the law environment, lack of transparency on the stock exchange market, both the Ambassador of the Czech Republic in Bucharest and the major Czech investors in Romania present at the event have concluded that our country is the most stable and promising market in CEE and investors continue to find it very attractive.
Most of the companies present at the event proved to be happy with their decision of choosing Romania as investment country and consider it has huge potential, whereas the Ambassador went on to add and encourage potential investors: “Czech companies are provided in Romania great perspectives for their business plans. Among decisive investment factors there are especially low costs of labour force and well qualified labour force”, he said.
The discussions went forward to highlight another decisive investment factor for companies when taking into account either an expansion, or a new market entry: the state aid schemes.
In our opinion and from our experience, state aid schemes are the most attractive funding sources for investors and they proved to be very effective,” added Valentina Craciun, financial advisor and auditor at Noerr Finance & Tax.
“Currently there are two state aid schemes running in Romania: the first is for companies that are investing minimum ten million Euro in Romania, whether for Greenfield projects, for diversification or for changing fundamentally the production flow, whereas the second scheme is for those companies which create at least ten work places in Romania, benefiting of up to 50 per cent of their salary costs for two years”,Craciun said.
At the end, it was Philip Smitka, who draw the conclusions after the two-hour open discussions: “I have gained the impression that Romania is the beautiful bride in the CEE where investors actually find good investment climate despite, maybe, different aspects that result more from the past. I think it is very promising and gives me the impression that, after very prominent investors have come from the Czech Republic and more and more companies are starting to invest, this is just the beginning of a really long-term and strong bilateral relationship.”
Philip Smitka, Associated Partner, is heading the commercial and dispute resolution practice of Noerr in the Prague office. He provides advice to foreign investors on issues of commercial and corporate law, as well as to Czech clients on their international activities. Within his expertise, he has provided advice on numerous cross-border M&A transactions, restructuring and outsourcing projects. He has cooperated, inter alia, on the implementation of distribution systems and in the fields of intellectual property, product liability, D&O liability, data protection and on renewable energy projects. A key area of his expertise is investment protection law.
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