The Annual Report is out: startups and sectors more effective in attracting foreign investments

After a first introduction to our Lombardy region has kept a positive trend with a 17% comparing , let’s go deeper into the analysis of a year of Invest in Lombardy.

Which sectors were more effective in attracting investments in Lombardy? The Annual Report highlighted that from 2003 to 2014 more than 50% of new FDI projects took place in the service sector.

In 2014 we registered the growth of FDIs related to startups, in connection with the process of Milan becoming more attractive for the creation of new enterprises. The city offers an ideal ecosystem for startups and the local authorities are supporting it (i.e. funding coworking places) believing in its function to create innovation in R&D, design and prototyping. A conservative estimate of coworking places counts 88 structures (more that 1,500 desks) in the city. The metropolitan territory of Milan ranks first in terms of innovative startups (533, 14.4% of the total based in Italy), so as Lombardy ranks first, hosting 833 innovative startups (21.8% of the Italian total). Lombardy is defined “a startup friendly region” and Milan declared the objective to become the European capital of startups.

While Europe and USA stay at the top of the list in terms of interest in investing in Italy, BRIC countries in ten years moved from 0.5% to 9.1% of the investments. Chinese investors are powerfully emerging with 9 acquisitions in 2014 and confirm the main factors of attraction: qualified human resources and high level skills. Due to the opening of a desk in India, the interest from this country raised (143 enquiries).

The analysis of the 546 foreign companies supported by Invest in Lombardy in the last 3 years (originated for 71% from 10 countries) has shown that the projects came from 53 different sectors. Pharma, Consulting, Automotive and Food were the main industries generating investment projects.

A deeper look into these figures was given on November 18th during one of our webinars, when Professor Marco Mutinelli commented the FDI Report also published on our website.