How to tempt companies from outside Switzerland

Having aggressive corporate tax is no longer enough to tempt businesses from outside Switzerland to relocate to an alpine canton. These days it is ultra competitive to attract new firms in as other jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Singapore move to lure the any of the increasingly mobile international corporations who are looking for a new domicile. Needless to say each one of these moves usually leads to the creation of new jobs in Switzerland and significant investment.

One way the various authorities of the cantons have managed, plan to manage and will attract these organizations is via low taxes in combination with actively promoting. However it seems there has been a very mixed set of results for these kind of activates. It has been publicly admitted by Fribourg that its marketing campaign to get businesses from outside Switzerland has been a failure. Not only that these initiatives are hugely expensive � it needs people present in the target nations, but they are hard to gauge whether they were the determining factor in an firm moving to that Canton.

Yet there have been some notable successes. The GBBA (Greater Geneva and Bern Area) is a special body set up to promote company relocation to Fribourg, Bern, Geneva and Valais amongst others. So far a staggering fifty four new firms have been attracted to Switzerland in the last twelve months by this organization alone. That has lead to somewhere in the region of two thousand new jobs in Switzerland already and many more are planned by these businesses.

Obviously this is a relatively new concept and using a dedicated promotional, marketing campaign to attract corporates to relocate to Switzerland is fairly new. However already the nation is benefiting form the creation of new Swiss jobs, recruitment in Switzerland and added tax revenues.