Bavaria’s Minister for Economic Affairs Franz Josef Pschierer opens the new Bavaria Trade and Invest branch in Hof

MUNICH/HOF   Bavaria’s Minister for Economic Affairs Franz Josef Pschierer opens the new Bavaria Trade and Invest branch in Hof. Bavaria’s “Invest in Bavaria”, “Bayern International” and now “Invest daheim” business development agencies are being consolidated into Bavaria Trade and Invest to bring more investments to the rural region. Hof is now the third port of call for possible investors, alongside Munich and Nuremberg. Pschierer: “A mix of industry that is fit for the future, a superb infrastructure and high quality of life make northern Bavaria extremely attractive to entrepreneurs and the workforce. We are advertising business locations in the rural region intensively and are particularly focusing on northern Bavaria with our branches in Nuremberg and from today onwards in Hof too. We are pooling our previous “export promotion”, “location marketing and support” under one roof with the new “Bavaria Trade and Invest” and expanding on this with the new “Invest daheim” unit. We are creating a powerful new team with this, with the aim of successfully locating companies willing to relocate and expand in this rural region. We want to provide financial incentives for this from 2019 with a new Bavarian investment fund to the tune of EUR 50 million.”
 
The new team is going to develop marketing measures that will support companies willing to invest. A fund is being set up with a share capital of EUR 50 million for Invest daheim, which can be used to support companies willing to relocate. The new Bavaria Trade and Invest is moving to the LfA Forderbank Bayern premises on Obere Tor square in Hof. Hans Peter Göttler, member of the LfA Board of Directors, explains: “The consolidation of LfA and the Bavaria Trade and Invest branch under one roof in Hof sets a strong signal for the region. We are going to use our broad financing network at Förderstützpunkt Hof consisting of banks, chambers, business promotion agencies, universities and associations together from now on to boost the local economy even more. The LfA has funded start-ups and SMEs in Upper Franconia with almost EUR 240 million since 2016 alone. As a result, businesses were able to make investments of roughly EUR 455 million and secure more than 28,600 local jobs and create more than 1,300 new ones.”
 
Pschierer highlights the major importance of Bavarian foreign representative offices in business establishment policy: “With their worldwide network, representative offices are crucial interfaces for internationalisation and they promote Bavaria as a research and production location and tourism destination abroad at the same time. However, we want to focus even more on location marketing and support in the rural region in future and exploit its potential to the full. For this, we are creating regional competency profiles and using them for targeted location advertising, developing a second pillar of location support for northern Bavaria with the branches in Nuremberg and Hof and promoting the acquisition of innovative and high-quality tourism investment in the rural region, alongside classic location promotion.”