Belgium region Wallonia open for SA businesses expanding to Europe

©skyfish555 via 123RF - Liège Airport

Wallonia, recently named one of the European Commission’s two preferred European Creative Districts because of its strategy to drive innovation, offers a favourable tax regime, grants and commercial property pricing designed to attract foreign investment and expansion into the region.

Several South African companies, including Bidvest, NTP, Sappi, Mondi and The Airplane Factory, operate from Wallonia. A meeting facilitated by AWEX in 2015 has also catalysed the expansion of SA-headquartered IT giant Dimension Data in the region.

Dimension Data, which already has a strong presence in Belgium, has forged a partnership with Belgian firm Win to launch a R105 million data centre in Villers-le-Bouillet near Liege. The new Win Tier III data Centre is now at the heart of Win’s ‘Cloud One’ enterprise service offering. “The Dimension Data - Win data centre partnership is the result of a trade mission contact initiated in February 2015, when South Africa was designated as a focus market of AWEX,” says Jean-Pierre Muller, head of the Awex office in Johannesburg. “Following this initial contact, our IT experts in Wallonia took over the task of identifying opportunities for data centres in Wallonia and will remain the primary contacts for Dimension Data any further developments.”

Trade agreements

The AWEX South African focus prompted talks with the South African Department of Trade and Industry organisation Trade and Investment SA (Tisa) last year. Reciprocal trade agreements have also seen businesses originating in Wallonia setting up offices in South Africa in recent years. Among them are Beka-Schreder, CMI, François Compressors, Hamon, Magotteaux, Solvay Polymers, Sopura and Swift. AWEX aims to step up its focus on bilateral trade and investment between Wallonia and South Africa next year.

Access to the European market

Declaring itself ‘open to the world’, the Wallonia region is situated centrally to multiple European markets, with its logistics expertise and communications network giving businesses access to 65% of the European market in just a few hours. Wallonia is the only region in Western Europe that is accessible to two-thirds of the European Union market within less than a day by road, while access to Liège Airport, Belgium’s largest cargo airport, and the fast-developing inland port at Liège, gives Wallonia-based business easy access to the world.

The region is focused on innovation and technical development, supported by 200 business parks, seven science parks directly connected to universities and research centres, nine universities, 300 research centres, 11,000 researchers and 20 centres of excellence.

Businesses in Wallonia benefit from competitive corporation tax, and considerable financial support – factors that have contributed to multinationals such as Google, Microsoft, H&M, GlaxoSmithKline, and Johnson & Johnson establishing a major presence in the region.