OFFICE
Dan ZAHARIA | Senior Consultant | EXTIND
IASI - WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN A CITY THAT ACTUALLY ROCKS? It’s easy to fall in the trap of falling in LOVE with your own city: your friends & family are there, your youth is there, your FUTURE should also be there. Pesimism is over-rated: all the BEST things could happen there, all the investors should really have no reason not to invest. This blindness is sometimes annoying: all the cities are the SILICON Valleys of something or at least magnets for INDUSTRY 4.0. Nobody listens but to their own PROPAGANDA while mass-media publish click-bait TOPs of cities in which to live, work or travel to. And you can get depressed if your city is not on one of that fake lists, or even worse, one of your NEIGHBOURING city is included in it.
But if everything is so PERFECT, what’s left for you to BUILD in your city, what’s left for you to FIGHT for? The key is going beyond of your inner circle and see the really good things that happened in your city in the past 12 months. “CONTINENTAL extends its office building in Iasi following EUR 27 M investment”; “The world’s largest online retailer AMAZON will expand its offices in Iasi, eastern Romania, by another 5,000 square metres by 2020”; “The opening of the Iasi office comes after a year of significant 58
growth for BLUE PROJECTS, both in terms of clients portfolio and revenue”; “Prime Kapital to develop EUR 200 mln mixed-use project in NE Romania”. “The Continental Research & Development centre in Iasi has grown from 30 people in 2006 to over 1,900 at the end of 2018. This growth came following the increasing number of projects that our colleagues are involved in. The investment proves the importance that the company is giving to the engineering centre in Iasi”, said Marian Petrescu, the manager of the Continental unit in Iasi. Opened in
2005, Amazon’s Development Center in Iasi was the group’s first R&D facility in Eastern Europe. It plays a major role in the city’s burgeoning tech industry, employing skilled experts who are inventing exciting new technologies in the fields of Cloud Computing, Information Security, Machine Learning and Data Analysis”. For those focused only on comparisons between Iasi and other Romanian cities like Cluj-Napoca and Timisoara, let me tell you that it’s a waste of time. We should zoom-out beyond our borders for the other regional successful cities from Central and Eastern Europe. For example LVIV, a city from Ukraine with 750k inhabitants and 140k students has only 20k employees in IT & Outsorcing, but a robust 4k relevant yearly graduates pipeline. And they announced at CEE Outsourcing Awards a new mixed-use brownfield development: Innovation District ІТ Park, with 6 buildings and 200k GLA office premises. And Lviv is just one of about 50 cities in the CEE with which we have to compare as potential, strategy and speed of development of the talent pole synchronized with the development of the stock of modern offices and the increase of the quality of urban life. For the sake of comparison, IASI has 445k inhabitants, 55k students and already 21k employees working in IT&O industry with a 3k pipeline of relevant graduates every year. Our city has efficiently capitalized on all its strengths (regional talent hub, air hub, saturation of urban economies of cities that started in these areas much earlier). Thus, the combined efforts of the local entrepreneurs, of the multinational companies established in Iasi, of the talents in the field and of the talent pool have been rewarded. The boom of the ITO industry in IASI was rewarded by winning at the CEE Outsourcing Awards Gala in Warsaw the title of EMERGING CITY OF THE YEAR by our city, in 2018. Maybe these are some of the reasons why the real estate developer Prime Kapital has launched SILK DISTRICT, the mixed-use project in our city, considered the largest city in NorthWWW.TRANSILVANIABUSINESS.RO