Within this framework, it was carried out, on Thursday in Atlantis, one of the missions planned for the year with companies from the Argentine province of Buenos Aires. The promotion agency seeks to connect companies and place products abroad. They will carry out missions in the state of Virginia in the US and possibly in Saint Paul and the northeast of Brazilas well as in the Paraguayan capital, Assumption.
scope.com spoke with the general director of the Investment Promotion Agency (API) of Canelones, Julio Filippiniand the deputy departmental director of API, Adrian Miguezas well as with the adviser on Export Promotion of the Municipality of Lanús, Oscar Yofréand the Argentine businessman, Danilo Menante.
– What was this business round about?
Miguez: At the Canelones government’s Investment Promotion Agency, which is part of the production cabinet, we have the mission of supporting and facilitating investment attraction for the department and at the same time promoting exports from our companies. It is within this framework that we generate this business meeting, with companies from the municipalities of Lanús, february third, Vincent Lopez and San Martinfrom the province of Buenos Aires.
Call reverse missions, is one of the ones we have planned for the year, in this case with Argentina, and 104 meetings were held this Thursday and Friday between the companies that come from Buenos Aires and Canelones. They are meetings to do business where the products of one will be exchanged with the products of the other. So, there is import, export, logistics, distribution, representation, and perhaps also some joint investment.
This took months of preparation. Some of the companies that participate here were also a couple of weeks ago at the largest food fair in the Americas, where the government of Canelones took a delegation of companies and, in addition to being there, we were in meetings outside the fair. with buyers from Brazil, from some supermarket groups.
It is part of our task to promote that entrepreneurs can do business, can internationalize. It’s something that we at API spend a lot of time on.
– What is the interest of Argentine companies in the Uruguayan market and, specifically, in Canelones?
Yofré: We represent a network of exporters from municipalities without trends in greater Buenos Aires and we coordinate with small and medium-sized companies in our towns the opportunity to export to neighboring countries and the rest of the world. In this case, we have done something different, which is the first experience we are having with a commercial mission between municipalities of practically the same size.
Canelones is a municipality of around 600,000 inhabitants, it is the municipality that presents a very important percentage of Uruguay’s GDP, and has an industry very similar to ours and the complementary need of other items. The idea is to one day do it with Montevideo since some of us sign agreements for it in the future.
We think that the businesses that are going to be set up with Canelones are going to be sufficiently important over time, because we have had a very good reception from importers interested in our products. So we have brought this first mission in which three municipalities participate, which have among their companies 60% percent of companies linked to food and drinks. So we have brought factories of important cookies, juices and other things, and from the construction related industrywith the metallurgical industry.
Many of us have more than ten counterparts for each company that we brought from Buenos Aires. So the expectation is to go ahead in this first business and that this serve as the first element for future trade missions, both with the Canelones mayor’s office and in the future with Montevideo’s or whatever we can in Uruguay.
Menante: Our firm is dedicated to infusions and natural products, and what we see is a great market appeal, on the one hand due to affinity, proximity, and then also business idiosyncrasy. We are very similar, there is an accessible dialogue, and there is also a very established importer profile that is very prone to doing international business. That does not happen in all markets. So, it is a very, very close and very similar market, that is what interests us.
Filippini: Our mission is to try to connect companies that trade with each other, place our products abroad, attract investment, generate these events so that they get to know each other, contact each other and see the possibility of doing business. Now the ambassador of Paraguay asked us for a meeting in order to be able to do it and also with that country. We have a mission in October in Lauron, Virginia, and we are going to take businessmen so that they have the necessary meetings to be able to take our products, but they also offer you products, it is a matter of going and flying.
Source: Ambito
