BORISLAV STEFANOV: BULGARIA SHOULD BE ADVERTISED AS AN INVESTMENT DESTINATION IN ABROAD

BGN 16.6 million are provided to attract investors from around the world, executive director of the Bulgarian Investment Agency said

The Bulgarian Investment Agency (BIA) will allocate BGN 15.6 mln under OP Competitiveness in order to organise conferences and publish advertisements which are expected to attract investors from all over the world, Borislav Stefanov, executive director of the agency said, quoted by BGNES News Agency.

The budget for advertising and direct marketing under the project is over BGN 10 mln, while the rest of the funds are earmarked for analyses and the development of a new website of the investment agency.

The agency has already printed 162,000 brochures in 6 languages, advertising the sectors in which Bulgaria wants to attract investments – machine building, electrical engineering, the chemical industry, food industry, transport and logistics, information technologies, outsourcing, and medical tourism.

There is a combined brochure about Bulgaria - all in all - 200 pages. Within a week, the agency will announce the most expensive bid on the project – a bid for a media campaign in leading print and electronic media. A bid to the amount of BGN 4.5 mln and plans to develop 36 advertising slots and 3 videos.

These will feature in editions such as The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, etc. The ads will be published as of November 2012 until March 2013. Borislav Stefanov pointed out that this is quite a tight budget for advertising an investment destination and that a single page add in The Economist costs ''a mere" €30,000.

The agency has given over the responsibility of organising the visits of 9 international business conferences onto VIP Travel and Andrea Capital. So far, events in London, Munich and Dubai have been visited and, as a result, a couple of companies from the automobile industry in Germany and a few companies from the food industry in Dubai have expressed interest. "They intend to visit the country and, perhaps, express interest in future investments," Stefanov said.