World Champion Austria Carinthia
Technology or countryside? Carinthia has both! Carinthia is often only associated with tourism and lakes. And the carnival. But that’s an image the country is rectifying now.
Promoting the business location “Carinthia has much more to offer than outsiders think and more to offer than people know about us. That’s something we have to tell the world,” says Martin Gruber, member of Carinthia’s provincial government. He believes that the province’s economy received a boost from the new campaign and the new business location magazine, which has the subtitle “It’s time for your success story in Carinthia” and is translated into four languages. Due to the Covid pandemic, the deck has been reshuffled for
Carinthia. “Digitisation has opened up many doors, supply chains have become shorter. It is the perfect time to invest in advertising our business location,” believes Gruber. It is therefore particularly important to show how business-friendly and investment-friendly the province is. “And when the Koralm railway is finished, Carinthia will have another ace up its sleeve,” he says optimistically. Carinthia has also become a trailblazer in sustainability and eco-economy: Busses running on hydrogen will soon be a clear indicator of this development. When someone in Carinthia speaks of “economy”, “settlement”, “talent”, “innovation” and of course the “business location”, the province’s settlement and holding agency BABEG (Betriebsansiedlungs und Beteiligungsgesellschaft) is usually involved. “Right from the start we felt that BABEG could get 100
© Johannes Puch
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arinthia has launched a new image campaign under the name “You know our lakes – now you’ll meet our pioneering spirit” to broaden its appeal as a business location. The campaign’s name signals the direction that Carinthia wants to go: Making all those factors come to the fore that went unnoticed so far – after all, Austria’s southernmost province has far more to offer than crystal clear water and beautiful mountains (without meaning to diminish the picturesque countryside). Outsiders often see Carinthia as a pure tourist destination and thus underestimate the province considerably. Carinthia is a high-tech region with major assets in the industrial sector, the IT sector and the manufacturing industry. More than half of the added value and almost 50 percent of employees can be found in the manufacturing trade. Carinthia – It’s My Life! This claim wants to spread the excellent unique selling points and diverse opportunities as a business, work and residential location. One major goal of business location marketing is to connect sustainability with innovation and to put the focus on eco-economy, research and development, as well as education. The idea is to interest companies in Carinthia as a business location and interest people in the province in general. Focus groups set up in Munich (Germany), Vienna, Graz and Ljubljana (Slovenia) helped to define what was needed.
Markus Hornböck, Managing Director of BABEG Carinthia
