Barça, the Generalitat de Catalunya –through ACCIÓ, the agency for the competitiveness of the company in the Department of Business and Knowledge– and Barcelona City Council will carry out actions to promote Catalonia internationally joint. It is the result of an agreement signed this Thursday by the president of FC Barcelona, Josep Maria Bartomeu, the Minister of Business and Knowledge, Àngels Chacón, and the first deputy mayor of Barcelona City Council, Jaume Collboni.
The aim of the collaboration agreement is to promote the positioning of Catalonia and Barcelona abroad and to attract new investments from foreign companies. On the one hand, it is planned to organize joint international promotional actions taking advantage of, for example, outings of the club’s professional teams abroad, either during the regular season or the summer season. At the same time, the agreement includes the possibility of jointly attending to foreign institutional or business delegations in Barcelona.
“The union of Barça, the Generalitat de Catalunya and Barcelona City Council for the promotion and dissemination of Catalonia in the world is great news. We will continue to work as before to strengthen the position of our country around the world with actions in which sport plays an important role. We make available to the country the visibility and esteem that our club arouses, with the aim of reversing the complex reality that we have to live. In these turbulent times and global uncertainties, alliances like this are needed, now more than ever: we all work hard together “, said Josep Maria Bartomeu.” This agreement originates from the good experience of the actions that were organized. Last summer, on the occasion of Barça’s first team summer tour in Japan, where the three institutions joined forces to present the assets of Barcelona and Catalonia to some forty Japanese companies, we want to continue working in this direction and take advantage of the trips of our teams abroad to organize meetings with agents and multinationals from the countries we visit to position our city and our country, and attract investors and other assets that are beneficial to boost our economy, “he added. institutional vice-president of the azulgrana club, Pau Vilanova.
The precedent of the tour in Japan
The alliance will continue actions that have already been carried out previously, such as the organization of the Barcelona Catalonia Talks, Business & Barça in Tokyo and Kobe business promotion and recruitment conferences last year, as part of the summer tour of the first team in Japan, to present the assets of Catalonia and Barcelona together. Taking advantage of the holding of football matches in these two cities, promotional events were organized with senior executives of about forty Japanese industrial companies and sectors such as life sciences, the pharmaceutical industry, chemistry, video games and robotics.
Through the agreement, therefore, they want to join forces and create new synergies between the three institutions. In the case of the Generalitat, the network of 40 foreign trade and investment offices of ACCIÓ is made available, responsible for attracting new foreign investment projects in Catalonia through comprehensive advice to companies. from outside during the recruitment and investment process.
“This agreement is an example of the sum of efforts that must allow us to take another step in the promotion of Catalonia abroad and thus contribute to the positioning of the country around the world: this requires long-term strategies, creating links and build trust, and the agreement we signed today goes precisely along this line, now more than ever in this environment of complexity. We want to strengthen the strategy of attracting foreign investment in Catalonia, which has already been recognized by entities such as the Financial Times. In the last five years (2015-2019), Catalonia has attracted more than 23.5 billion euros of foreign investment, 35% more than in the previous five years “, said the Minister of Business and Knowledge, Àngels Chacón.
“Barcelona’s economic recovery demands the alignment of public and private agents and, therefore, the accumulation and optimization of all the resources available in the city, and the agreement signed today is a further step in this direction. Public and private collaboration makes even more sense in areas such as international economic promotion, because the result of adding the reputational value of Barcelona, FC Barcelona and the Generalitat de Catalunya is exponentially higher than if we were separated “, he considered the Deputy Mayor for Economy, Work, Competitiveness and Finance of Barcelona City Council, Jaume Collboni.
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