IMPRESSIONS OF DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN PARTICIPANTS AT "SARAJEVO BUSINESS FORUM 2012"

 

General evaluation of around 1,000 participants of this year's Sarajevo Business Forum is that this year's SBF was organized on the highest level and that three days of forum were used for making business contracts and contacts with foreign investors.

"Sarajevo Business Forum was very successful. We have made some concrete results at this year's SBF, enabled new jobs and drawn respectable investors," Bosna Bank International director Amer Bukvic said at the closing ceremony of the Third International Investment Conference "Sarajevo Business Forum 2012", which was held in Sarajevo from 16 to 18 May.

Maid Jabandzic from the "Madi" company Tesanj came to the SBF for the first time this year and he already made cooperation with Abdullah Saleh Al Othaimi, owner of the "Al Othaim Holding" company from Saudi Arabia.

"We produce and process chicken meat and we registered our project at the SBF. Mr. Al Othaim saw our project on the SBF webpage and sent us an email and we had a business meeting here in Sarajevo during the SBF. Al Othaim Holding representatives will come to our company in the following days so that we could arrange details for production broadening and export of our products to Saudi Arabia. That would enable opening of 150 jobs," Jabandzic told us adding that beside this investor, one other company from Saudi Arabia "Shaaer Holding Group Company" is interested in importing their products.

Another meat company from B&H made concrete results with foreign investors and that would be "Kaplan Product LTD" from Visoko which produces and processes meat.

They will cooperate with Jordan companies which will import B&H meat and meat products.

Beside that, we agreed upon incensement of our products with BIGMEV CEO Muzafer Cilek. If we manage to realize all that, we would hire 100 new workers," Fikret Kaplan, one of the meat industry owners, said.

Sarajevo Business Forum was highly evaluated by the foreign participants as well.

One of them is PhD Wernwr Albeseder, president of consulting company "Prime" from Austria. 
"My consulting company represents a couple hundred companies, not only from Austria but also from the whole Europe. I am here for the third time and more and more people visit this forum. People from the West are slightly afraid of Islam but the fear disappears when they come to B&H.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a place where businessmen from the West make contacts with those from the East. Bosnia is a heart of Europe and an ideal place for connecting people," Albeseder said.

Marijan Covran, director of "CT-Intrust", a company which represents a thousand companies from Croatia, had the same impression.

"I am here for the third time and I can say that this is a great opportunity for projects to be presented and investors found. I made contacts with investors from Turkey and Saudi Arabia. I offer tourism projects on behalf of my clients every year but this year we had concrete agreements on food production. Food production and processing is what they are mostly interested in and we will make concrete agreements in the near future," Covran said.