Member Article

North West firms leading charge to double experts to central and eastern Europe

Over 60 small businesses are attending an intensive, five day, trade mission this week, led by Trade & Investment Minister Lord Livingston.

Aimed at boosting trade with Central and Eastern Europe, the visit includes several delegates from the North West including Cheshire based Proseal UK Ltd, who were visited by Lord Livingston last month, when he opened their third UK factory.

Porseal UK Ltd is based in Adlington and designs and manufactures food packaging equipment. It employs almost 200 people and overseas trade doubled last year from £2.5 million to £5 million.

Other North West companies attending include The Fine Bedding Company and Stylewise UK, Manchester, ATG Access from Haydock, Merseyside, Westinghouse Electric Company UK Ltd from Preston and Daresbury-based Albatross Financial Solutions.

The trip forms part of a broader effort to meet UK Trade & Investment’s (UKTI) target of doubling trade with Central and Eastern Europe by £30 billion by 2020. The delegation of businesses includes companies from the energy, rail, healthcare, life sciences, retail and security sectors, reflecting some of the highest value opportunities for British businesses in this region.

During the visit Lord Livingston will launch two new British Business Centres in Slovakia and Hungary, transforming the quantity and quality of support available to small and mid-sized UK firms exporting to those countries. Each business centre will be staffed with trade teams.

A British Business Centre for Poland opened last year and Business Centres in the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovenia are due to open shortly.

Trade Minister Lord Livingston said: “These are dynamic and exciting growth markets. British firms have doubled trade exports to Eastern and Central European countries in the last ten years, but there is so much more we can achieve.

“By 2020, I want to double exports to this region, so we are ramping up our support for British firms on the ground by opening a network of business centres across the region and increasing the number of trade missions to introduce more British businesses to potential buyers.”

The four countries of Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, along with five others in the Central Europe Network (Austria, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia and Croatia), have a combined population of over 100 million people, a combined GDP in excess of £1 trillion and annual average growth rates that in recent years have far exceeded most other European countries.

These countries also have low levels of public debt compared with the Eurozone average and the region is about to benefit from £124 billion of EU funding between 2014 and 2020, enhancing investment prospects in infrastructure, energy and innovation.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Malia .