GCI News

Serbia has been at the top of the world for several years when it comes to attracting foreign direct investment. Our intense and persistent efforts to seek investors, global marketing and faith in Balkan countries such as Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and Northern Macedonia have proven to be very successful, according to Uve Cirbes, Chairman of the Board of GCI UNIT. This German by origin, who in the opinion of his clients is known as a real "magnet" for attracting foreign direct investment, stresses in an interview for our magazine that he will not overdo it if he says that Serbia is, on many issues, developing even faster than its native Germany. Many people will wonder whence in Serbia because many of the investors go West. -I came to Belgrade for the first time in 2016 and was impressed with the city's beauty, as well as the people who live together, regardless of their different nationalities. If it wasn't for a special reason, and I'll explain to you, I probably would never have come to Belgrade because of negative prejudices and bad marketing about your country. But everything I heard through the media, everything that was written and said about this country over the years, everything negative, in the very short term, was completely transformed into a positive one. 

More than two years since it was first announced, Montenegro’s new Citizenship by Investment Program is now officially open. Yesterday saw the first official applications submitted. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development announced on Tuesday the invitation to acquire Montenegrin citizenship through investment, after being done by the tourism sector earlier this year. According to the criteria set out by the line headed by Milutin Simovic in the invitation, the Montenegrin passport will be eligible for investments of at least two million euros. Namely, the Ministry of Agriculture invited interested investors to submit proposals for development projects in the field of agriculture and wood processing by the end of 2021 in order to draw up a list of projects on the basis of which Montenegrin citizenship can be acquired. It is stipulated that the list of development projects, determined by the Government, can only include those in which investment in primary agricultural production amounts to at least two million euros, in the processing of agricultural and fishery products at least three and a half million and in wood processing at least four million - said from ministries.

Serbia tops the Greenfield FDI Performance Index 2019. The south-east European country is ranked number one in the annual study by fDi Intelligence, a Financial Times data division of which fDi Magazine is also a part, which looked at inbound greenfield investment in 2018 relative to the size of each country’s economy. Serbia scores 11.92 in the index, closely followed by Montenegro (11.49) in second place and Cambodia (10.82) in third.