23 February 2012

Site selection tools

Dr. Balazs Csorjan, chief editor of ElectroSites Blog, recently uploaded two useful file to SlideShare.net. Now we make it available for ElectroSites' readers.

The first presentation is about Central- and Estern European electronics sites selection, an introduction to this topic.

The second one is a general (not sector-specific) tool, an example for a site selection questionnaire. It helps when you try to collect information about potential manufacturing sites, it's a proven checklist for this purpose.

03 February 2012

Cluj, the leading electronics location in Romania

Hungary, the Czech Republic or Poland are still the leading electronics manufacturing locations in CEE, but emerging locations like Romania deserves higher attention.



Romania provides low labour cost (especially on operator level), relatively good technical education, low taxes (corporate profit tax: 16%), weak union movements and stabil euroatlantic orientation. With 21 million inhabitants, this is the 7th most populated member state of the European Union. In recent years, electronics manufacturing companies discovered the opportunities of Romania.

Cluj, the capital of Transylvania

The city of Clij-Napoca (in Hungarian: Kolozsvár, in German: Klausenburg) was established in ancient Roman times. Today, Cluj with 300,000+ inhabitants is the 2nd largest city of Romania. Cluj is also an educational center, more ten thousand students live here.
The city is deeply integrated in global economy, more shared service centers and manufacturing companies are located in the business parks of Cluj.

Tetarom Industrial Parks, Cluj

Tetarom Inc. provides 3 business parks in Cluj: the Tetarom 1-2-3 have approx. 200 hectare industrial lands. Tetarom parks are focusing on high tech industries like IT, automation, robotics, and first of all electronics.





Emerson's facility in Tetarom 2.



The leading companies are Emerson, Nokia, BYD, StoraEnso, employing 10,000+ workers in Tetarom Parks. At the end of 2011, the local Nokia factory was closed (because of the market situation of Nokia cell phones), and 3,500 well-trained workers lost their jobs. This labour pool provides a quick market entry for future investors: the ex-Nokia workers know all the best manufacturing standards and keen to find a new electronics job in the city.