Photo: Peter Hilz/ANP
the summary
- Last year, foreign companies announced investments of 2.3 billion euros in the Netherlands.
- This includes 13,400 jobs.
- And 74 British companies joined the double in the previous year.
It is clear that the Netherlands was more popular with foreign companies in 2021 compared to the previous year. The number of companies established or expanded in the Netherlands has increased to 423. This is significantly higher than the 305 companies in 2020, when the pandemic made it difficult for foreign investors to come to the Netherlands.
This is evident from an overview that Invest in Holland and the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency (NFIA), part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate, announced on Thursday.
The investment amount is lower than in 2019
The number of investments is higher than the level of 2019 (397) and previous years. At 2.3 billion euros, the volume of investment was much lower than in 2019, when 4.3 billion euros in investments by foreign companies were announced. In 2020, the amount of investment amounted to 1.9 billion euros.
The number of jobs related to direct investment reached 13,400, up from 8,600 in 2020, but down from 14,100 jobs last year before the pandemic.
Many Brexit companies
The majority of investments came from the United States. In second place is the United Kingdom, where this number doubled in one year to 74. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016, 316 companies have chosen the Netherlands, which is good for 782 million euros in investments and about 8000 jobs.
Most of the jobs created, more than 4,400, are in the ICT sector. Transportation and Logistics ranks second with 1,600 jobs.
Miki Adriansens, VVD’s Minister of Economic Affairs, notes that foreign companies are making a “significant contribution” to the economy. “For example, they represent 30% of all private investment in research and development in the Netherlands.”
Sustainability and digitization
Adriaansens says that since 2020, NFIA has focused more on attracting “high-quality activities in innovation, digitalization and sustainability.” She says she is pleased “because we are seeing the first results of that in the annual numbers.”
Some examples of foreign companies that the agency believes are accelerating sustainability, developing new digital applications or enabling future innovations in 2021, were Bristol-Myers Squibb, Scottish Cafe, and American-Indian Quantiphi.
Bristol Myers Squibb is building a cell therapy laboratory in Leiden. A sufficient investment in Sas van Gent, where the remaining produce from the neighboring Cargill factory is processed into proteins to replace meat. Quantiphi announced an office in Amsterdam. This site wants to help healthcare, education, and government implement artificial intelligence.
