The 2011 - Ambassadors' Road Show – Goals and Dreams

“In addition to targeting US investors, however, this time (in May, 2011-editor) the AmCham Bulgaria road show will also seek to reach out to the Bulgarian diaspora in the USA to present to its members the opportunities for development and career in Bulgaria on the grounds of the major American investments in the country.”

The 2011 "Ambassadors' Road Show" will be seeking to boost the investment interest in Bulgaria on part of businesses across the USA, said Valentin Georgiev, the Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Bulgaria in an interview for the Bulgaria-US Survey of Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency).

The project will essentially be built along the first such business road show in the US organized by AmCham Bulgaria, ex US Ambassador to Bulgaria John Beyrle, and Bulgarian Ambassador to the USA Elena Poptodorova back in 2007 shortly after Bulgaria joined the EU, said Georgiev .

"2007 was 2007. Bulgaria has changed a lot since then, it has now been an EU member for four years, and we would like to stage a second, more large-scale "business road show" to talk to potential American investors on all topics, and to present the investment opportunities in Bulgaria. We will have once again the two current ambassadors. There are a lot of new things. Bulgaria now has the lowest taxes in Europe, and we have an agreement with the US for avoiding double taxation, which has entered into force. This is extremely important because in that way we can present to the US investors Bulgaria's advantages in fiscal terms right away. But we also already have major success stories that we can present," Georgiev explained.

He explicitly emphasized the importance of demonstrating the success stories of major American investments in Bulgaria pointing to the US energy company AES with its large-scale projects in thermal power and renewable energy; the emblematic examples in IT and services outsourcing in Bulgaria, Hewlett-Packard, which recently announced massive expansion of its center in Sofia, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco; Kraft Foods which invested heavily in new facilities in Bulgaria in 2009; companies such as Honeywell and Johnson Controls.

"In our "AmCham-Ambassadors' Business Road Show" we are going to present these success stories because they are indicative of the trends of US investments in Bulgaria in the past two years... We have kept all of the American investors who came here - AES, HP, Kraft, Honeywell - none of them has left, and they have actually been expanding their operations.

What is more, the AmCham road show will also approach a top US university in order to sound out opportunities for an American-Bulgarian education project that can be linked with the development of US investments in IT and services outsourcing in Buglaria. "We will certainly talk about HP because our idea is to visit San Francisco and the Silicon Valley. During our outsourcing forum in November we talked about the potential "Bulgarian Silicon Valley" for the Black Sea region, and if it can happen in Varna. But here we are getting to a more ambitious task. Some critics tell us to be more modest in these times of crisis but it is good to have dreams.

We would like to see if it is possible to get some of the top American universities interested in a Bulgarian project. For example, could a university such as Stanford make an agreement with a Bulgarian university, and perhaps even open a branch here?" the AmCham Bulgaria Executive Director said.