Foreign investors prefer Britain
 Much of the foreign investment is in London and the South East |
It won 686 projects in 2006, a 23% rise on the year before and accounting for 19% of all foreign investment deals in Europe, according to Ernst & Young.
More than half of these - 361 - were in London and the South East.
Scotland also fared well in terms of attracting overseas investment, almost doubling the number of deals from 33 in 2005 to 63 in 2006.
The European Investment Monitor found most British investment came from the US, but noted that levels were growing from Brazil, Russia, India and China.
India invests
The overall number of investment projects in Europe grew by more than 15% - from 3,066 in 2005 to 3,531 in 2006 - with western European countries the main beneficiaries.
About 211,000 jobs were created as a result, the report said.
Source: Ernst & Young
Having previously threatened to overtake the UK as the most popular destination, investment to France grew modestly in 2006, and its percentage share fell.
The importance of India as a foreign investor was one of the key trends to emerge, with the country now the second most important source for inward investment into the UK - growing by 53%, and by 66% into Europe as a whole.
"Indian companies are winning clients from domestic Western European competitors by investing in sales and customer support offices and also software development centres close to their European customers as a means to drive growth," said Ernst & Young's regional development director Nigel Wilcock.
Source: Ernst & Young
"This is actually good news for the UK because not only from an Indian perspective is there a cultural affinity with London and the South East, but the City is at the heart of the European service sector economy."
US firms
The main losers in the report were Poland, Hungary, Russia and the Czech Republic, whose project numbers all fell.
The report's authors put this down to the relative decline in the number of manufacturing projects - saying that companies seeking a low cost base were turning to China and India rather than central and eastern Europe.
However, Romania and Bulgaria both saw major investment ahead of their admission to the European Union.
IBM and Microsoft were the two companies investing most into Europe, the report said, followed by DHL and GlaxoSmithKline.
No comments:
Post a Comment